Japan

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Hibi tells about mother who does pottery and lives rather simple life, growing her children up. She does remarkable job in pottery, finding a new way to make natural pottery in her own tunnel kiln. Then, her son gets leukemia. And entire family has to fight hard to find a donor who has matching bone marrow. The movie is unique and beautiful story about life, but at the same time, very hard and realistic movie about leukemia. Little a bit eccentric character of Kiyoko, acted by Yuko Tanaka is fantastic as such characters haven’t yet seen in Japanese screen since eighties. Read More »

Shirō raids the office of the organization that attacked his lover, wreaking havoc and escaping with a stolen handgun. In retaliation, the organization hires two killers to get rid of Shirō. The duo begin to develop a strange kinship with their target…Read More »

A press photographer returns to Japan from the war in Vietnam after losing his friend and fellow photographer on the battlefield.Read More »

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Miyuri Obara (Moeka Hoshi) is a quiet outsider among the mean girls at her provincial school, opting to keep to herself — and to tackle her angst through tentative self-harm — rather than fight back. Her only companion is, in fact, a silkworm.Read More »

A strange duo, Minko and Hiroto, who believe themselves to be angels, throw out fashion massage leaflets called “Angel Dispatch” from the roof of a building on Christmas Day in order to save unfortunate people. The flyers were blown by the wind and fell into the city.Read More »

Due to the high suicide rate among youths in Japan, the government implements experiments to uncover the causes behind the high suicide rate. Children are selected and placed in a YSC facility under constant surveillance. At the age of 10, the children are then give a detonator with a red switch. They are told if they press the switch they will die immediately. Most of the children under the experiment, eventually presses the switch and dies.Read More »

Shiro Toyada is known for his literary adaptations and this is an early adaptation of Fumiko Hayashi’s work, the second after Sotoji Kimura’s A Wanderer’s Notebook from three years ealier. Like Toyoda’s later 50s masterpieces it features strong minded woman and weak, feckless men.

Crybaby Apprentice tells of four sisters, the eldest, the widowed Sadako, has a failed businessman as a lover and two children, eleven year old Keikichi and his younger sister. The boy’s sullen demeanour gets on “uncle’s” nerves and after moving in to save money he threatens to move out again. During the course of the film Keikichi is passed from one sister to the next, unwanted either as a nuisance or through poverty.Read More »

Midori, is a young, and vibrant girl who enjoys her school and classes, but after her mother became very ill, and their dad evaded contact with her, her mom dies from her ailments. Midori is then tricked by a circus producer to enter his funfair, where she is consistently raped and abused by the circus folk, but when she is on the edge of giving up hope, she is acquainted by a dwarf, and her whole world changes.

Based on the manga Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show by Suehiro Maruo.Read More »

A documentary film about prostitutes, yakuza, labor unions, and tourists in Koza City (now Okinawa City) before the reversion of Okinawa to Japan.

Shot over a period of 15 months from April 1969 to July 1970, Motoshinkakarannu —which takes its name from the Okinawan word for “business without seed money” (a euphemism for prostitution)—captures a tumultuous time in Okinawa’s occupation. With the impending reversion, the NDU chronicles a confluence of sentiments across the island prefecture from anti-American riots to labor protests. An immediate and radical work, Motoshinkakarannu delivers an unflinching snapshot of Okinawa at the time, revealing racial tensions, discrimination, imperialist gazes and more through its raw immersion into the lives of sex workers, yakuza, tourists and GIs.Read More »