Short Cut: Seigo Tôno '83

Seigo Tôno’s obsession with American pop culture began with a crisp white polyester suit and the searing falsetto of the Bee Gees. The year was 1977. Seigo, an elementary school student in Japan, sat mesmerized in a dark movie theater watching Saturday Night Fever. When his mother bought him the soundtrack, that vinyl record became his gateway to a lifelong love of film.

Before long, Seigo was consuming American movie blockbusters like Star Wars and Jaws. Noticing their son’s growing obsession, his parents decided to lean in. “My father was very supportive,” Seigo recalls. “He thought, ‘Maybe if Seigo wants to study English, he should go to school in America.’” This is how Seigo ended up on the Fay School campus in the summer of 1983. At Fay, Seigo’s love of film grew, and he enjoyed spending time at the movies and discussing films with friends. It was at an on-campus screening of Neil Diamond’s The Jazz Singer that Seigo first realized that movies could do more than simply entertain. “The Jazz Singer is about the Jewish community, and I didn’t know anything about Jewish people in America,” Seigo says. “Films can be a window to the world where you can learn many things about different cultures.”

Seigo remained in the U.S. to study journalism at Pepperdine University, but it was a three-year stint in Clermont-Ferrand, France, home to the prestigious short-film festival Festival du Court Métrage, that altered his trajectory. That’s where he fell in love with short films. Typically running under 40 minutes (and sometimes as brief as eight minutes long), these low-budget, non-commercial projects represent cinema in its purest form, requiring filmmakers to deliver their message with absolute precision. Short filmmaking also offers a degree of freedom that commercial filmmaking lacks. “A filmmaker can express his or her creative message without thinking about whether it’s going to make money or be distributed,” Seigo says. 

Accomplished filmmakers like George Lucas and Ridley Scott got their start in short films, and the work of talented filmmakers often gets noticed at the worldwide festivals where these films are screened. In 1998, Seigo wrote and directed his first short film, Ichigo-ichie, which earned an official selection at the Tokyo International Short Film Festival. He has since produced over 20 short films and has become a key promoter of Japanese film internationally. For over two decades, Seigo has served as the Festival Director of Short Shorts Film Festival & ASIA, promoting Asian short films on the global stage. In 2004, SSFF & ASIA became an official qualifying festival for the Academy Awards, granting it the prestige of recommending films directly for Oscar consideration in the three short film categories. 

Today, the festival draws roughly 5,000 entries from around the world annually. Alongside his festival work, Seigo partners with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to produce one film each year that highlights the city. “It’s not a typical promotional video of Tokyo, it’s an entertainment piece,” Seigo explains. “We have actors and a story, and that story just happens to be set in Tokyo. It might get people thinking about visiting Tokyo for their next trip.” 

While Seigo loves sharing Japanese cinema with the world, he also deeply values the cross-cultural connections he forges with international filmmakers. An example of this global reach is that after China, SSFF & ASIA receives a remarkably high volume of film submissions from Iran. “Iranian films are very well-crafted, and they have many young, talented filmmakers,” says Seigo. His festival work has led to multiple invitations to serve as a jury member at the Tehran International Short Film Festival. There, he has had the opportunity to connect with local directors.  “They tell me that they like to make cinema because it’s one of the few ways that they can become internationally known and work outside of Iran,” Seigo notes. 

In Seigo’s view, the pared-down simplicity of the short film medium is exactly what makes it so effective at revealing our shared humanity across cultural divides. “The great thing about short film is that if a filmmaker from Senegal makes a film with a beautiful message, we understand the cultural differences, but the core message is universal,” he says. “We can feel the filmmaker’s sincerity and love, and I think that’s very powerful.”