The filmmaker Mitsuo Yanagimachi has a problem. "I have no audience," he says, shaking his finger at an interviewer and cracking a wide grin just after a screening of one of his films in Tokyo last month. Though he is widely regarded by knowledgeable critics in Japan and abroad as an immensely talented director, their warm praise has not turned into widespread popular appeal. It's a fact doesn't seem to bother Yanagimachi too much, though it may be one reason for his decade-long break from filmmaking. That period finally came to an end with the release of his 2005 feature "Who's Camus Anyway?", which won the top prize in the "Japanese Eyes" section of the 18th Tokyo International Film Festival last year. "Camus" was a surprise hit at TIFF, as it was at the New York Film Festival where it was very well received, and it marks the return of an important Japanese director who has this year been invited to join the jury of the 19th TIFF.

After the 1976 release of his first feature film "Goddo supiido yuu! Burakku emperaa" (Godspeed you! Black Emperor) Yanagimachi made a new movie every few years until the beginning of his self-imposed exile in 1995. In that time he built a strong reputation for his characteristically unsentimental and nonjudgmental manner of telling stories. Some critics have complained that he does "not say very much," but Yanagimachi has never been all that interested in giving his own opinions away in his films. Rather, his body of work manifests the implicit understanding that the proper role of a filmmaker is to watch, learn, record and present the lives of people and places with as light and deft a hand as possible, letting the audience ultimately decide matters for themselves.

"Who's Camus Anyway?" is very much in keeping with this attitude towards directing. The film offers a brief and often bland look at the lives of a group of Japanese university film students who are preparing to make a movie about the abrupt and nonsensical murder of an old woman by a young school boy, an vicious act that alludes in turns to both Meursault's meaningless fit of violence in "The Stranger" and Raskolnikov's murder of an elderly pawnbroker in "Crime and Punishment."

The film opens five days before shooting is scheduled to begin when the actor who had been cast as the lead must leave Tokyo on short notice and an intense young man steps into the role. Over the following days we are given a glimpse into the lives of the cinema-obsessed students, who do a lot of everything except study, and their melancholic chain-smoking professor, and the story ends in an unexpected frenzy of violence that is left uncommented on as the credits role. It is a small film, in scope and ambition, but one that manages to capture well the idiosyncrasies of life on a Japanese university campus, and something of the meaningless meandering of time, thought and action that Camus would no doubt relate to.

Yanagimachi drew on his experiences during the three years he spent as a visiting professor of film studies at Tokyo's prestigious Waseda University for the film. Much has changed since his college years in the 1960s and 70s, when campuses were hotbeds of political activity and student protest movements against everything from the US-Japan Security Treaty and the Vietnam War shut down schools and eventually spilled out into the streets of major cities. Today, even at a university as competitive as Waseda, students are far more likely to spend their time endlessly socializing in one of the school's hundreds of saakuru (activity clubs), like the film club the students in "Camus" belong to, or dancing hip-hop routines in the quads, which in recent years has become a favorite pastime for young urban students (a vaguely comic activity that marks the film's impressive opening sequence).

"Three hours of teaching every day makes you thirsty," Yanagimachi said of his time at Waseda, "and drinking alone is pretty lonely. So I started going out with the students after class. Naturally, while we were hanging out we began to talk about all kinds of private topics, about relationships, about their friends, and of course about sex and problems with parents. In the beginning I didn't ask them questions because I was planning to make a movie, only because I was enjoying it."

One compelling element of the youth culture that Yanagimachi found himself immersed in has become a favorite topic of debate in Japan: the almost total disregard among young Japanese for politics or other serious social issues. "In these informal settings I would try to shift the topic sometimes, so I would ask them something like 'what do you think of the Iraq war.' In most cases the conversation would just stop. Young Japanese people have lost their ability to talk about current affairs. They are uninterested, and won't get close to a topic like that. They just don't want to think about it and don't have an opinion. I believe that is a characteristic of the Japanese youth today. But they are still living their lives, and I wanted to deal with this in my film."

While the characters in "Camus" are obviously themselves lost in the insular, carefree world of Japanese youth culture, it is a state of affairs that goes uncommented on in the film.

"First of all this is a movie and I try not to deliver my message," said Yanagimachi. "I tried to make the university the stage, before even judging if it was good or bad. I myself may want them to think more as if they were adults. I would like them to study more and be willing to share their opinions, be it on Iraq or Yasukuni. But that is not how things are. The movie is a portrayal of reality. I had no intention to protest or praise."

As with Yanagimachi's past work, it is perhaps his willingness to let characters develop on their own terms that gives "Camus" its subtle power. "Subtle" is the key word here, for there is little in the film that would recommend it as a popular hit the likes of which movie-goers are most likely to recognize in this day and age. And so it is that the forum provided by a festival like TIFF is hugely important for films like "Camus" and filmmakers like Yanagimachi, which have something profound to say, though they may only say it in a whisper. For Yanagimachi, who admits his own personal difficulty finding an audience, the role of the festival, and this year his role as one of its jury members, is clear.

"There are a variety of film festivals and competitions all over the world, but it's not like wonderful movies are made all that frequently," he said. "So regardless of the present reality, regardless of what will become of the film industry, if there is one movie among the many that are submitted that has a strong identity and that recalls what a cinema's raw power can be, I want to evaluate it and give it its due. It is for that reason, with that expectation, that I have agreed to join the festival's jury."