Japanese film veteran Takeo Hisamatsu never expected to return to the helm of the Tokyo International Film Festival, his country’s largest event celebrating cinema.

“It was a surprise, but I thought it was an honor and a good opportunity for me to do some of the things I couldn’t accomplish before,” he says.

After a long career at legacy studios in both Japan and Hollywood — he spent lengthy executive stints at Shochiku and Warner Bros. — Hisamatsu was named director of the Tokyo festival in 2017 and served until 2021. Veteran diplomat Hiroyasu Ando, who had been appointed chairman in 2019, subsequently took charge of the event with a mandate to overhaul its direction. Ando made a spate of swift changes, relocating the festival to Tokyo’s glitzy Ginza and Hibiya districts, shaking up its programming staff, adding more filmmaker talks and reviving the Kurosawa Akira Award.…