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Commencing well-respected Nippon director Kazuo Kuroki’s sixth decade behind the camera, “A Boy’s Summer in 1945” (literally “A Beautiful Summer in Kirishima”) is a lyric, novelistic drama set in the countryside in the last days before Japan’s surrender ending WWII. Striking a welcome retro note in its languid pacing and delicate handling of seriocomic ensemble threads, handsome production is a natural for fests. It might also prove a cornerstone for retrospectives or ancillary releases of works by a helmer (“Preparation of the Festival,” “Ronin-gai”) who’s long been appreciated at home but has won just limited attention abroad.

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Japan in the painful aftermath of World War II. The film centres on 15-year-old Yasuo and the adults around him as they go through their usual routines during this unusual time. Yasuo feels guilty for surviving when so many of his classmates were killed. He witnessed the death of his best friend during the bombing and the memory of it tortures him. The others, too, have their own crosses to bear. Meanwhile, a poor widow and a wounded soldier meet surreptitiously, a beautiful wife bids farewell to her first lover, and a maidservant marries a veteran who has returned home without his leg. So many lives, so many loves… Yasuo is gradually losing control of himself…

1.74GB | 1h 58m | 860×366 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/8ABC08BC32E61C6/A_Boy’s_Summer_in_1945.mkv

Language:Japanese
Subtitles:None

The post Kazuo Kuroki – Utsukushii natsu kirishima AKA A Boy’s Summer in 1945 (2002) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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Kaido is a professional pickpocket who works the Tokyo subway with his young foster-daughter, Rei: She lets herself be groped while Kaido relieves the groper of his wallet. More often than not they’re observed by a middle-aged cop, who generally lets Kaido go free. Rei is unsettled when Kaido takes on a young street punk, Kazuki, as an apprentice — with instructions to make Kaido stop drinking. Kazuki, however, would like to go into business with Rei.

1.37GB | 01:53:48 | 720×384 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/45FC7DDECDC117B/Suri.avi

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:None

The post Kazuo Kuroki – Suri aka Pickpocket (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Kazuo Kuroki’s international award-winning period drama was produced in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the death of Shozo Makino, “the father of Japanese films.” Set in the 1830s near the end of the age of the samurai, Ronin Gai is populated by an ensemble of colorful characters, social outcasts who patronize a restaurant and brothel on the outskirts of Edo. Among them are prostitutes and masterless samurai reduced to drunkenness and debauchery. The disgraced and disillusioned former warriors get a chance at redemption when renegade samurai invade the area to murder the prostitutes.

2.30GB | 1h 57mn | 1280×720 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/A0D56E9D7AC799A/Ronin.Gai.1990.WEB-DL.720p.h264.AAC.2.0.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/4E7D7A1AD3BBF78/Ronin.Gai.1990.WEB-DL.720p.h264.AAC.2.0.part2.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/ADA32CA04EC0476/Ronin.Gai.1990.WEB-DL.720p.h264.AAC.2.0.part3.rar

Language:Japanese
Subtitles:English (Hardsubbed)

The post Kazuo Kuroki – Rônin-gai aka Street of Masterless Samurai (1990) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Tateo is a young man living in a small rural village. He is a credit bank clerk, but his work is tedious. He tends to be interested in sex, but he does not quite fit in with the sexually loose milieu. The only thing he is really interested in is cinema. He dreams of becoming a screenwriter and writes some fragmentary scripts. But he cannot find any good subjects around him. Pretty much everything there is boring to him. One day, Tamami, his neighbour’s daughter, comes back from Osaka, where she worked in a cabaret. And things start slightly changing.

2.22GB | 1 h 56 min | 1024×560 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/5D8AE9226C8CF6D/Preparation.for.the.Festival.1975.WEBRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language:Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Kazuo Kuroki – Matsuri no junbi AKA Preparation for the Festival (1975) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“Very sweet, wryly funny in spots, but always haunted by war (described sparingly but never shown). It was based on a stage play and betrays its theatrical roots in some of the pacing and staging. It’s slow, perhaps too slow for action film fans, but it’s not boring. Rather, it’s delicate and precise like tea ceremony.

This is the story of an elderly couple told in flashbacks to a few weeks in the spring of 1945. The two main characters, Etsuko Kamiya and Nagayo-san are played by 40-ish actors who convey their younger 20-something selves convincingly. The literal translation of the Japanese title is “Etsuko Kamiya’s Youth.” The actress who plays Etsuko looks too young, however, as her elderly self (who appears first in the movie), so much so that I was confused at first when she called Nagayo “tô-san” (“Dad”), so that I thought he might be her father or father-in-law, instead of her husband. He looks considerably older than she in the scenes that show them as elderly. It’s not uncommon for Japanese women to call their husbands “Dad” when they have children. However, no offspring appear on-screen, nor are there any direct allusions to children in the dialog. It takes the flashbacks to reveal who these people are to each other through showing us their younger selves.”(IMDb)

1.38GB | 1h 53mn | 803×452 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/769AE6A7544A718/The.Youth.of.Kamiya.Etsuko.2006.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Kazuo Kuroki – Kamiya Etsuko no seishun aka The Youth of Kamiya Etsuko (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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On August 9, 1945, the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. This film, based on a story by Mitsuharu Inoue, describes the daily life of people in Nagasaki the day before that fateful event. It presents the human drama of people’s lives, and their feelings of joy and sadness. These include a newlywed couple, an expectant mother, an American prisoner of war, and star-struck lovers who must say farewell because the boy is called to serve in the army. Each of these people, like others in the city, hoped to live with their dreams for ‘tomorrow’. However, tomorrow never comes for them, as their lives are brought to an abrupt and unexpected end. But in this case, knowing how the story ends doesn’t detract from the experience at all; rather, it heightens the emotional impact, which is further enhanced by the poignant musical score from Teizo Matsumura. ‘Ashita’ is the first film in Kazuo Kuroki’s ‘War Requiem Trilogy,’ which also includes ‘Utsukushii Natsu Kirishima’ (2002) and ‘Chichi to Kuraseba’ (2004).

1,97GB | 1 h 44 min | 1024×556 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/7F0D00DFA269151/Kazuo_Kuroki_-_(1988)_Tomorrow.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Kazuo Kuroki – Tomorrow – ashita (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

This was also voted No.55 on 1999’s Kinema Jumpo Poll of Top 100 Japanese Films of All Time.
It’s a samurai film but its style is rather different from those Toei & Daiei jidaigeki in 50s & 60s (probably not surprising as an ATG production), It has a non-heroic (or at least, unorthodoxy) portrait of the protagonist: Ryoma, at times even a parody, with the wry humor everywhere in the film. But it also looks a bit like a documentary, as the film is very grainy and the cinematographer is Masaki Tamura, who’s responsible for the look of many Shinsuke Ogawa & later, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films.

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Kuroki Kazuo was one of the leadoing filmmakers of the 60s and 70s independent film movement centered on the Art Theatre Guild (ATG). The Assassination of Ryoma shows the last three days of Sakamoto Ryoma, a hero of Meiji Restoration, who was assassinated a year before the Restoration was achieved. Like Yamanaka, Kuroki rejects showing Ryoma only as a hero. Rather, he focuses on anonymous people as well as on the carnivalesque mass events called “eijanaika”, in which commoners would rampage through an increasingly restive Edo (Tokyo) chanting “why not?” The film is one of many attempts in the period to think through the first one hundred years of Modern Japan, which came into being after Ryoma was killed. Kuroki’s discontinuous modernist style is exhilarating to watch, and helps connect Ryoma’s tragic end to the “Asama mountain lodge” incident of 1972, in which a radical political sect involved in a series of murders was caught in a standoff with the police. Perhaps we can see in the film’s loose and fragmentary form the confusion of radical artists, caught in the transformation from the political activism in the 1960s to the consumerism in the 1980s.

Scan about Kuroki Kazuo from “Viennale 2003 – Art Theatre Guild”

https://nitro.download/view/25C3E0BD2545830/The.Assassination.Of.Ryoma.1974.DVDRip.XviD-MNAUCE.avi
https://nitro.download/view/BCDCFE87122A8A3/The.Assassination.Of.Ryoma.1974.DVDRip.XviD-MNAUCE.srt
https://nitro.download/view/03D0CC2736B9D91/The.Assassination.Of.Ryoma.1974.DVDRip.XviD-MNAUCE.srt

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:Chinese (srt),English

The post Kazuo Kuroki – Ryoma ansatsu aka The Assassination of Ryoma (1974) first appeared on Cinema of the World.