imdb:
A mysterious street-painter, Jouji, wanders aimlessly, homeless. Together with his homeless pals, he makes his living by selling his paintings on the street. His paintings, dynamically exploding on pieces of cardboard, catch the eyes of Kyoko, an art dealer. He can feel alive only if he keeps painting, but unable to find something to fill his void inside, he tries to drown himself in alcohol. Drawn to Jouji, Kyoko commissions him to paint for her. The two travel to a secluded mountain-side, and there Jouji becomes inspired both by the natural surroundings and Kyoko herself.

Deracine.2004.Shun.Nakahara.DVDRip.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 35 min
Size: 	5.97 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x480
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	8 793 kb/s
BPP: 	1.061
Audio
#1:  	Japanese 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/5DB72E5DD395ABF/Deracine.2004.Shun.Nakahara.DVDRip.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/8C448D63A899EDE/Interview.with.Actors.&.Director.DVDRip.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/286E66549751F5A/Screening.Q&A.DVDRip.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:Japanese

Many thanks to @Evan for this copy!

The post Shun Nakahara – Déracine (2004) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Yoshihiko now lives with a couple of old friends, a married couple, Ryosuke and Aya. They share a past in several senses. It was Ryosuke who walked off with Yoshihiko’s girlfriend Aya. In doing so, he broke up with his own girlfriend, Reiko. Now they are all back together again and old feelings begin to surface. The complex relationship and history between the four gradually becomes apparent: Yoshihiko was convicted and imprisoned during the student movement.

Directorial debut of Haruhiko Arai.

Body and Soul (1997).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2h 6mn
Size: 	4.56 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	26.913 fps
Bit rate: 	5 034 Kbps
BPP: 	0.090
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC @ 113 Kbps (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/AF82E3A23DA75C1/Body_and_Soul_(1997).mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:None

The post Haruhiko Arai – Mi mo kokoro mo AKA Body and Soul (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

letterboxd wrote:
Toyoichi Otomo suffers from psychological and spiritual troubles after a horrific industrial accident. He lives with his elderly mother and wife near Mt. Aso in rural Kyushu. He seeks solace in a small religious group run by Buddhist nun Chishu-bo who claims to be the 68th descendant of famed 11th century poet Izumi Shikibu. The members of her sect regard her as a living saint. Yet instead of balming his soul, she riles his libido by playing a sexual cat-and-mouse game with the fragile Toyoichi. When she does bed him, it leads to a miracle healing – followed by a terrible calamity.

Shikibu.monogatari.1990.Kei.Kumai.DVDRip.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 52 min
Size: 	3.84 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x480 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	4 676 kb/s
BPP: 	0.564
Audio
#1:  	Japanese 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/46E42160BB875D8/Shikibu.monogatari.1990.Kei.Kumai.DVDRip.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/1BBF958C397ED36/Shikibu.monogatari.Trailer.DVDRip.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles.None

Many thanks to @Evan for this copy

The post Kei Kumai – Shikibu monogatari (1990) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
LEAD: EARLY in ”The Sea and Poison,” the harrowing Japanese movie now at Film Forum 1, a surgical team performs a lung operation on a young woman. It is probably the most graphic view that most of its audience will ever have had of the scalpel and forceps doing their work, and you may find yourself joining the young intern Suguro, who confesses, ”Today in the operating room, I had to close my eyes.

EARLY in ”The Sea and Poison,” the harrowing Japanese movie now at Film Forum 1, a surgical team performs a lung operation on a young woman. It is probably the most graphic view that most of its audience will ever have had of the scalpel and forceps doing their work, and you may find yourself joining the young intern Suguro, who confesses, ”Today in the operating room, I had to close my eyes.”

That episode prepares us for another operation, the climactic scene in which a captured American pilot is subjected to vivisection experiments. Again, there is the feeling of being trapped in an operating room; you can’t watch, but you can’t stop watching. In these scenes, the director, Kei Kumai, proves himself a master of a kind of super-realism.

Mr. Kumai’s script, drawn from a novel by Shusaku Endo, is less gripping. Mr. Endo based his controversial work on an atrocity committed in the spring of 1945 by doctors at the University of Kyushu medical department. Under orders of the military, they performed fatal experiments on eight American fliers. Twenty-five of those involved were convicted of war crimes.

Mr. Kumai tells the story through three participants in the operation -two interns (including Suguro, sympathetically played by Eiji Okuda) and a nurse. Their reasons for cooperating – careerism, weakness, jealousy – smack of a kind of fiction that doesn’t rise to its momentous subject. Perhaps the characters were better developed and more convincing in Mr. Endo’s novel.

At the end, Suguro’s friend Toda (Ken Watanabe) says, ”You never know what those who would punish us would do if they were placed in the same position.” Resonant words, but there’s not enough here to back them up. And Mr. Kumai seems to lose control altogether whenever military types are brought on; the American interrogator seems to have been borrowed from Japan’s wartime propaganda movies, and the cackling Japanese officers from Hollywood’s.

When he is directing his camera at the operating table or into hospital wards or along the hospital’s heavily shadowed corridors, however, Mr. Kumai is very much in charge. His vision, in black and white, is strong, steady, serious. The poignantly beautiful image we are left with, the residue of the experiment on the operating-room floor being washed away to the sea, suggests the depths of a deeply troubling theme. A Tragic Experiment THE SEA AND POISON, written and directed by Kei Kumai, based on the novel by Shusaku Endo; in Japanese with English subtitles; photography by Masao Tochizawa; music performed by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra; produced by Kanou Otsuka. At Film Forum 1, 57 Watts Street.

Kei Kumai - (1986) The Sea and Poison.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 3 min
Size: 	3.01 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x556 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 293 kb/s
BPP: 	0.241
Audio
#1:  	Japanese 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/4E3289E28868742/Kei_Kumai_-_(1986)_The_Sea_and_Poison.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/DF7725AC899B696/The.Sea.And.Poison.1986.DVDRip.XviD-MNAUCE.srt

Language:Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Kei Kumai – Umi to dokuyaku aka The Sea and Poison (1986) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
For those unfamiliar with its deep meaning, the Japanese tea ceremony appears to be a long, incredibly boring, basically uneventful ritual process. In contrast, for many of its practitioners it offers the key to understanding how to live life in a meaningful manner, and is in itself a refreshment for the spirit. The tea master Rikyu was a key figure in the evolution of the ceremony, and his teaching lineage continues to the present day. In 1591, as a result of a difference of opinion with the ruling warlord of Japan, Hideyoshi Toyotomi (Shinsuke Ashida), tea ceremony grand master Rikyu (Toshiro Mifune) was forced to commit suicide. This story is told in a series of flashbacks, as Honkakubo, Rikyu’s closest disciple, contemplates the death of his master and his associates, and seeks to clarify his understanding of those events. In this film these suicides are interpreted as a clash between spirituality and materialism. In Rikyu, the other 1989 film about the tea master, his political differences with the general are brought forward. – Clarke Fountain, Rovi, New York Times

Quote:
Years after the death of legendary tea master Rikyu, his disciple Honkakubo attempts to resolve the mystery of the master’s death. Years before: Sen Rikyu is a ceremonial tea master who advises warlord Hideyoshi in sixteenth-century feudal Japan. His daughter, the beautiful Lady Ogin, has an unrequited love for Lord Ukon, who has angered Hideyoshi by becoming a Christian convert. Ogin’s father Rikyu also displeases Hideyoshi by opposing the warlord’s plan to invade China and Korea. When the animalistic Hideyoshi is rejected by Ogin, he threatens her and her father with arrest and worse. – Summary by Jim Beaver, IMDB

1.66GB | 1h 47m | 680×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D6960E3D56B5F9D/Death.of.a.Tea.Master.1989.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language:Japanese

Subtitles:English

The post Kei Kumai – Sen no Rikyu AKA Death of a Tea Master (1989) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The fifth directorial effort and the first in around six years from film director and actor Okuda Eiji. This drama, set before and after the Great East Japan Earthquake, offers a delicate depiction of a man and woman forced to leave their hometown in Miyagi Prefecture due to the ‘sins’ they have committed.

Kyoko (Ando Sakura) was left with no choice but to depart her hometown after reluctantly selling her body in order to support her family. Shuichi (Emoto Tasuku) served time in a juvenile corrective institution due to his extreme actions in protecting his mother from his violent father. They leave their mutual home of Minamisanriku in Miyagi Prefecture and start new lives in Tokyo, where they experience the Great East Japan Earthquake.

1.66GB | 2h 16mn | 862×466 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/F78A6CFF19E3363/Case_of_Kyoko%2C_Case_of_Shuichi.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/365966E00235DC6/Case_of_Kyoko%2C_Case_of_Shuichi.part2.rar

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Eiji Okuda – Kyôko to Shûichi no baai AKA Case of Kyoko, Case of Shuichi (2013) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Mariko (Momoi Kaori) is living the life of a typical Japanese college student in the 70’s, spending far more of her time balancing boyfriends and part-time jobs than on her schoolwork. She finds herself torn between a former boyfriend (Morimoto Leo) who’s the tough, insensitive-but-sexy, type, and a new acquaintance (Okuda Eiji) who’s more sensitive to her feelings, but who still acts childishly selfish at times. Will she choose one of them, or decide to go her own way?

Mo.hozue.wa.tsukanai.AKA.No.More.Easy.Life.1979.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 53mn
Size:	3.21 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	1024x554
Aspect ratio:	1.85:1
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	3 810 kb/s
Audio
Japanese 2.0ch AAC LC @ 253 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/E7A5C536C3BAB28/Mo.hozue.wa.tsukanai.AKA.No.More.Easy.Life.1979.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Yôichi Higashi – Mo hozue wa tsukanai aka No More Easy Life (1979) first appeared on Cinema of the World.