Japan

Synopsis:
Gohatto stars Beat Takeshi, Asano Tadanobu and a fifteen-year-old Matsuda Ryuhei as the beautiful son of a well-to-do merchant who joins the Shinsen Gumi militia in Kyoto for the “right to kill,” and ends up doing so both by his sword and his good looks. Gohatto explores themes of jealousy, madness and destruction within the context of bushido homoeroticism; not only does this violent love story play out within the bounds of same-sex relationships, but within a single militia.Read More »

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
On the same day of this word created from the depth of despair, the Christ passed away on the cross, A.D.2015, Virus has been spreading in many cities worldwide. It is a suicidal disease. The virus is infected by pictures. People, once infected, certainly come down with the disease, which leads to death. They have no way of fighting against the disease filled with fear and despair. The media calls the disease the Lemming Syndrome.Read More »

An interesting documentary about an interesting man, to say the least. Kazuo Hara follows up his controversial work “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On” with a bio-documentary about Mitsuharu Inoue, a famous and popular (especially among women) post-war Japanese writer. The film follows the last few years of the life of Inoue before he dies of cancer in 1992. The film starts out as a usual bio-documentary like many others, but the second half of the film digs into the writer’s past and comes up with some unexpected discoveries.Read More »

Quote:
Kaoru, a woman in her 30s, is married to an older, blind and apparently mute man, whom she cares for in a house in a small coastal town on the Izu Peninsula. She claims to be dependent on him, but what binds them does not seem to be love. In her wandering, Kaoru discovers the bar of an association.Read More »

Nankyoku Monogatari, (lit. “South Pole Story”) is a 1983 Japanese film directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara and starring Ken Takakura. Its plot centers on the 1958 ill-fated Japanese scientific expedition to the South Pole, its dramatic rescue from the impossible weather conditions on the return journey, the relationship between the scientists and their loyal and hard-working Sakhalin huskies, particularly the lead dogs Taro and Jiro, and the fates of the 15 dogs left behind to fend for themselves.Read More »

Can the theatre arts survive in the 21st century?

If Theatre 1 is about the world of Hirata, Theatre 2 is a feature documentary, which depicts the relationship between Hirata and the world we live in. In order for his art and his not-so-commercial company to survive this highly capitalistic modern society, what kind of strategy does Hirata have and practice?Read More »

Every Monday at 6 pm a young woman is murdered in the subway. The psychiatrist Setsuko Suma is called in to assist the police. The trail leads to another psychiatrist – Dr Rei Aku – who Setsuko used to date. As she get closer to the solution, she gets more and more convinced that Aku’s deprogramming of former sectmembers is important.Read More »

What is peace? What is coexistence? And what are the basis for them? PEACE is a visual-essay-like observational documentary, which contemplates these questions by observing the daily lives of people and cats in Okayama city, Japan, where life and death, acceptance and rejection are intermingled.Read More »

A haunting tale of destiny and life’s unpredictability: an elite bureaucrat, humbled by an incident which ruined his promising career, has a chance encounter with a glamorous hostess, heartbroken by her husband’s death.Read More »