I would like to offer my sincere congratulations for the staging of the second Okinawa International Movie Festival.

Since its inception, the Okinawa International Movie Festival has enjoyed a close relationship with the Pusan International Film Festival, and there have been active exchanges between the two. The participation in the first Okinawa International Movie Festival in 2009 by Pusan International Film Festival director Kim Dong-ho (who chaired the Okinawa festival’s judging committee), program director Kim Ji-seok, and executive committee member Yang Shi-on led to the invitation to screen two movies produced by Yoshimoto Kogyo (Hitoshi Matsumoto’s “Symbol” and Itsuji Itao’s “The King of Jail-Breakers”) at the fourteenth Pusan International Film Festival, which was in turn attended by a large delegation from Yoshimoto Kogyo.

My belief is that this has been made possible by the fact that the empathy between the two movie festivals as embodied in their mutual desire to cooperate with one another has yielded a vision for the movie festival of the future.

I look forward to the launch of the second Okinawa International Movie Festival in 2010. Given the exceptional organizational abilities demonstrated at the first festival in 2009, I have high hopes that the 2010 edition of the Okinawa International Movie Festival will once prove to be a marvelous event for both audiences and movie-industry people alike.

I fervently wish that the preparations for the second Okinawa International Movie Festival go smoothly and that the 2010 event enjoys great success.