Yoshihiko now lives with a couple of old friends, a married couple, Ryosuke and Aya. They share a past in several senses. It was Ryosuke who walked off with Yoshihiko’s girlfriend Aya. In doing so, he broke up with his own girlfriend, Reiko. Now they are all back together again and old feelings begin to surface. The complex relationship and history between the four gradually becomes apparent: Yoshihiko was convicted and imprisoned during the student movement.
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The story is about a film director, Kutani, who lives in the dying pink film industry, and an aspiring screenwriter, Iseki, and their loved one, Shoko, whose dream of a film she has clung to begins to crumble, and their lives intersect.Read More »
Acclaimed screenwriter and filmmaker Haruhiko Arai dusts off his director’s hat following his 1997 Body and Soul to turn a passion project of 30 years into a reality. An adaption of Yuichi Takai’s prize-winning 1983 novel of the same name, This Country’s Sky is a nuanced drama set in Suginami, Tokyo towards the destitute final years of WWII. Satoko (Fumi Nikaido) is a 19 year old girl falling passionately in love with her older married neighbor (Hiroki Hasegawa), who has been spared combat due to his failing the military physical examination. Even away from the battlefield, as they grow closer their feelings are caught up in the violence of war.Read More »
Quote: When it rains it pours. Kenji divorced his wife, lost his job and his old squeeze Naoko is getting married back home in the north of Japan, specifically in Akita. He returns there in order to attend her wedding. Naoko surprises him by proposing that they have sex again. The one night stand is the new beginning.Read More »
Synopsis: A young prostitute tries to understand why she suffers from melancholy and benumbed feelings. Against a background of sexual liberation and political subversion, this latest libertine work by radical film director M. Adachi is one of the very few existing feminist erotic films. Masao Adachi’s personality and films deserve careful consideration. Relatively unknown as yet to Western audiences, he happens to be one of the most radical film-makers around in recent years. Gushing Prayer, shows the influence of Koji Wakamatsu, another enfant terrible of Japanese cinema whom Adachi assisted on many films. Gushing Prayer does not hesitate to show the resentments and dissatisfactions of someone who ought to be nothing more than an object of fantasies. Highly pertinent, with a bold avant-garde style, he sets the record straight as far as the sexual desires of supposedly liberated Japanese women are concerned. One of the rare feminist films of the 70’s, it audaciously evokes sexual liberation and political subversion.Read More »
