Japan

Melodrama based on a novel by Yukio Mishima.Read More »

Amechiyo is being hunted by his father for being too beautiful and as he tries to escape he runs into Princess Raccoon, a raccoon in human form. They fall for each other, but humans and raccoons shouldn’t mix so the raccoon court causes some trouble. She saves his life, then he saves hers by finding the Frog of Paradise on the Sacred Mountain and so forth, until the tragic finale.Read More »

Practically a template for post-war Ozu — by Ozu’s (slightly) senior colleague at Shochiku. Shimazu’s millieu here (reasonably well off middle class) and domestic dilemmas presented are closer to late Ozu than pre-war Ozu is. Shin Saburi is a salaryman married to Kuniko Miyake (an Ozu mainstay from the 40s through the 60s), with a younger sister (Michiko Kuwano). Saburi has job problems — and has to worry about marriage prospects of his sister (who is a westernized office girl). Whenever the family runs into problems, they turn to family friend Chishu Ryu (playing a part very like that he plays in Ozu’s Early Spring). The solution to the family’s woes, however, betrays its era — a move to Japanese-occupied Manchuria as colonists.Read More »

An unforgettable mixture of bubblegum teen melodrama and grisly phantasmagoria, Obayashi’s deranged fairy tale House is one of Japanese cinema’s wildest supernatural ventures and a truly startling debut feature.

Distressed by her widowed father’s plans to remarry, Angel sets off with six of her schoolgirl friends in tow for a summer getaway in her aunt’s isolated mansion. But all is not well – in this house of dormant secrets, long-held emotional traumas have terrifyingly physical embodiments and the girls will have to use all their individual talents if any are to survive.Read More »

Original Title in Japanese: パレスチナ1948 NAKBA
The year 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the foundation of Israel. It marks also the beginning of 60 years of the suffering for the Palestinian people. This tragedy is referred to as the “Nakba,” meaning catastrophe in Arabic.
Since 1948 at least 420 Palestinian villages have vanished. The photo journalist Ryuichi Hirokawa has filmed over 1,000 hours of footage and has taken thousands of photographs of the Palestinian people and their vanished villages. This film is a distillation of this footage.Read More »

A mental journey through a woman’s physical odyssey through urban landscapes and nature.Read More »

A young jazz musician’s desire to advance in his career runs afoul of organized crime in this thriller from Haruki Kadokawa. After a saxophonist starts playing at a particular nightspot, a thug from the Yakuza adopts him as a special friend for no greater reason than he plays one of his favorite songs well. As the dangerous life of the gangster intertwines with that of the musician, it brings harm to the musician’s girlfriend, who is raped. This changes the young saxophonist’s attitude about his patron, but his Yakuza “friend” is still too embroiled in his own problems to worry about anything else.Read More »

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In the second half, we discover that Toyomi is pregnant and while Shintaro and Yurie are on their extended honeymoon, she bears his child, a girl named Kiyoko.Read More »

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Toyomi, a rich young woman is in love with Shintaro, a rich young man. Unfortunately, Shintaro’s father is in the process of arranging a marriage for him with Yurie, the scion of an even wealthier family. In order to avoid this, the two young lovers flee to Tokyo to live together.Read More »