Japan

Famous detective Kosuke Kindaichi follows a dying man’s words to an enigmatic island, where he meets beautiful twin sisters and tragic events unfold.Read More »

This drama is adapted from a Japanese television mini-series. In the story, an industrialist learns of a medical condition which will greatly shorten his life. He is on a trip to Europe at the time, and a glimpse of a Japanese woman in that setting causes him to fantasize about her as the personification of his impending death. As his dialogue with his imagined mortality continues, he actually meets the living woman who is the template for his fantasy, and together they tour rural churches. Gradually he comes to some kind of peace about the diagnosis. When he returns to Japan, he is met with a series of challenges which profoundly test the lessons he has learned.Read More »

On a post-war peaceful day in Japan, Toyomatsu Shimizu, a barber as well as a good father and husband, is suddenly arrested by the Prefectural Police as a war criminal and sued for murder. According to the accusation by GHQ, Toyomatsu “attemped to kill a US prisoner”, which was nothing but an order by his superior and failed after all with hurting the prisoner by weak Toyomatsu. Also, Toyomatsu was driven to corner at the trial by the fact that he fed the US prisoner some burdock roots to nourish him. Toyomatsu believes nothing but being not guilty, but he is sentenced to death by hanging. Prior to the execution, Toyomatsu writes a long farewell letter to his family, the wife and the only son: “If I ever incarnate, I hate to be a human being any more…. Oh yes, I would like to be…a shellfish living on the rock-bottom of the sea.”Read More »

A woman’s face disappearing behind, and emerging from, a pair of hands. Flashing lights. An empty building full of dark hallways.

A film that could be a unified scheme produced by layering together a number of axes of semiotic systems. With the frame as the basic unit, the film is composed by designing an accumulation of symbols representing reactions to light.Read More »

Set of rapid telescopic images of a gym, in fast forward, traveling through itself, space and time.

700 continuous still photographs which are re-photographed frame by frame with linear, circular, and parabolic movements going up and down. This creates a crazy roller coaster out of this peaceful gymnasium shot in the dark.Read More »

Quote:
Based on a gekiga (adult orientated manga) penned by Kazuhiko Miyatani,this is director Ikeda’s first movie after leaving Nikkatsu over censorship disagreement. It’s a unique variation of the standard vengeance theme,sort of classy (albeit very bloody) version of I Spit On Your Grave. A fisherman,opposed to the construction of a nuclear power plant,is murdered by a gang of right-wing extremists who are puppets of the corrupt contractor.The dead man’s devoted wife concocts a plan of revenge.She slaughters the men in the goriest,the most grisly ways imaginable,thus removing any suspicion from her.In fact,the newspapers soon begin reporting stories of “a blood-fiend from the lake” and “a ghost mermaid.”Read More »

Double (2001)
A film of the interactive video installation and performance art Double/Bunshin that Ito did in collaboration with Butoh dancer Setsuko Yamada in 2001.Read More »

Yusaku, whose nickname is “Tonkatsu Taisho” (General Pork Cutlet), is a popular young children’s doctor. Mayumi, a female doctor of another hospital, plans to expand her clinic with the advice of a lawyer named Oguro by destroying small houses. Oguro, however, plans to take advantage of Mayumi’s plan and build a cabaret instead.Read More »

Takashi Ito wrote:
I turned my gaze to the various events in daily life and made this filmic diary in a manner as if confessing my feelings. Of course, since I was making the film, I wanted to depict these feelings and events with tricky techniques. I used various methods to shoot photographs of a relative’s wedding, the landscape I see from window of my house, commemorative travel photographs and the like frame-by-frame.Read More »