Synopsis:
The daughter of a powerful man, Birei, disappears and Koryu is sent to Tokyo to investigate. She soon discovers that Birei was kidnapped in a gangster’s diamond smuggling ring that is very close to home. Soon she is surrounded by the gangster’s army of martial arts experts…Read More »
A man is confined to a mental institution after trying to murder his fiancee. Two doctors relate his problem to an Asian philosophy that states that mental defects are transmitted from generation to generation. He learns that one of his distant ancestors murdered his wife as a way of demonstrating a point to his lord about the importance of love over the emptiness of lust and to drive home the point further, created a series of illustrations of the dead woman decaying which in turn trigger the memories of his distant descendent. But is the whole thing merely a game concocted by the two doctors, who may even have driven themselves mad?Read More »
Quote:
‘Escape from Japan’ chronicles the misadventures of Tatsuo Ihara, a small-time criminal who dreams of seeking his fortune away from Japan. Timed to coincide with the Tokyo Olympiad and released on July 4, Escape From Japan can be safely assumed to have something to say about Japan’s place in the world and its relations with the U.S. in particular. It also proves less an imitation than a black-comic send-up of the sort of sordid crime stories that Seijun Suzuki and others specialized in.Read More »
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In 1968, Ogawa decided to form Ogawa Productions and locate it at the newly announced construction site of Narita International Airport in a district called Sanrizuka. Ogawa chose to locate his company in the most radical of the villages, Heta. Some farmers immediately sold their land; others vehemently protested and drew the support of social movements across the country. Together they clashed with riot police sent in to protect surveyors, who were plotting out the airport. Summer in Sanrizuka is a messy film – its chaos communicating the passions and actions on the ground.Read More »
Plot: An ambitious department store worker endeavors to improve his station in life
by manipulating women to get what he wants – money that is.Read More »
With the memory of WW II still fresh in Japan in1960, the atmosphere is unsettled as the specter of renewed world nuclear conflict is once again in the air. When a US military aircraft carrying a nuclear weapon inexplicably explodes over a river crossing the line of demarcation between South and North Korea during South Korean military exercises in the area, tension between Cold War antagonists rise to new heights, involving Japan directly because of the American military bases they host. As accusations of blame are traded back and forth, the movie tracks the increasingly volatile situation through the eyes of a group of Japanese high school students and their families, a newspaper reporter and his idealistic nurse girlfriend, and a Christian troubadour and his invalid wife.Read More »
Ryota, a timid salaryman who has difficulties fitting in at home and work has his average life changed after his estranged father falls ill. Along with his wife Sae and their only child Moe, he travels to his father’s country town, where he begins to uncover his father’s mysterious past spent searching for a mythical creature.Read More »
One entry of a trilogy of Seishun Kayo Eiga (youth film featuring songs) directed by Toshiya Fujita with Kumiko AkiyoshRead More »
Shinsuke Ogawa began his career in filmmaking in the early 1960’s, directing industrial films for Japanese public relations firms, but he had a desire to make films of greater consequence, and left his job to become an independent documentarian. Ogawa examined the rise of the Student Left in Japan in 1966’s Sea of Youth and 1967’s The Oppressed Students, and in 1968, as protest among the young became an international phenomenon, Ogawa and a handful of like-minded young filmmakers set up a collective house in rural Sanrizuka. A growing number of young activist filmmakers joined Ogawa in their new home, where they made documentaries focusing on the battle between the builders of Toyko International Airport and the farmers who would be displaced by the project and refused to leave. Read More »