Quote:
Go and Merry were members of a circus that took care of Trapeze Ladder Mochi and Ossei. The troupe that came to Hawaii for a tour went bankrupt. The only thing they received in exchange for their retirement allowance was a birdcage containing Ohm. However, the two find a loan deed with 12 million yen written on it in the birdcage. The two return to Japan and start working part-time on that day to earn money for their travel expenses, with the intention of collecting the loan after completing the deed. One day, Go meets Nanako, who seems to be a traveler, and as they go on a number of dates, he becomes attracted to her. She said she was on vacation with her parents, but a few days later she returned to Japan without telling me anything. Go and Mary come to Tokyo’s Banki-cho, where the deed’s tenant is. The tenant, Gonjuro Kamoshita, ran away from his wife and ran a pawn shop by himself. Gonjuro looks at the certificate the two of them handed out and says that he has a certificate for the money he lent to the people in town, and if they collect it, he will get the money back. The next day, the barber and other town residents who had heard the rumor came to the pawnshop to negotiate, but Gonjuro was hit by his favorite puffer fish and died. When Go hears that Gonjuro has a daughter and works at a greengrocer in Kanda, he immediately goes out to meet her. However, to his surprise, the girl was Nanako. The next day, Nanako started shopping around at pawn shops. Go works as Nanako’s right-hand man, but his debt collection doesn’t go as planned because he’s dealing with tough people from the town. By resorting to coercive measures, the two men seized the tools of their trade. As the days pass, Go and Nanako open up to each other. Mary, who was jealous of the two, took her deed and sold it to the townspeople for 300,000 yen, then disappeared. That evening, Nanako tells Go that she wants to go see her mother, who left her when she was little. Go sees Nanako and her mother from the shadows and quietly disappears from in front of Nanako. When Nanako returns to the pawnshop alone, she is warmly welcomed by the town’s residents who sense her despondency and come to cheer her up. Go comes to the zoo and finds Merry happily looking into the pond in front of the pond. As they watched the innocent man swimming and lying around, they dreamed of one day working in the circus again.

	
Wani to oum to ottosei 1080i HDTV AAC MPEG2 .mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 26 min
Size: 	4.84 GiB
Video
Codec: 	MPEG-2
Resolution: 	1440x1080 ~> 1920x1080
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	Variable
BPP: 	
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC

https://nitro.download/view/AE77242D413EB0E/Wani_to_oum_to_ottosei_1080i_HDTV_AAC_MPEG2_.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/8E428EB48AEF338/Wani_to_oum_to_ottosei_1080i_HDTV_AAC_MPEG2_.srt

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:Japanese, English

The post Shigeyuki Yamane – Wani to omu to ottosei AKA Crocodile, Parrot and Fur Seal (1977) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Yumechiyo Nikki is the story of a woman who is suffering from leukemia, the result of exposure to the atomic blast when she was still unborn. In the last three years of her life, she returns home, a small hot spring resort in the San-in Region and runs a geisha house inherited from her mother.

1.98GB | 2h 08m | 876×474 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/72F68D0BAC1D79D/Yumechiyo_Nikki_AKA_Yumechiyo’s_Diary_-_1985_-_Kirio_Urayama.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Kiriô Urayama – Yumechiyo nikki AKA Yumechiyo’s Diary (1985) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
It is easy to forget what a breath of fresh air Kawase Naomi once seemed within Japanese filmmaking circles when she first emerged, aged just 18, at the turn of the 1990s with a series of highly personal Super 8 diaries and experimental films. The subsequent international recognition for her Caméra d’Or-winning feature debut Suzaku (1997) trailblazed a path for a new generation of women directors, such as Nishikawa Miwa and Tanada Yuki, who have since established successful commercial careers, slowly eroding the long-entrenched gender imbalance within the industry.

And yet in comparison with these figures, Kawase remains something of a marginal presence in her homeland, her prodigious output (which includes numerous documentaries, shorts and anthology segments alongside her eight features) buoyed instead by European funding and a consistently high Cannes profile. This outsider status can be attributed in part to her decision to base herself far from the industry hub of Tokyo; many of her films, including Hotaru (2000), Shara (2003) and The Mourning Forest (2007), are set in her birthplace, the ancient capital of Nara, while Nanayo (2009) and Still the Water (2014) unfold in exotic locales further afield, in Thailand and Okinawa respectively.

It seems fitting then that Kawase’s first film to be set in Tokyo (or rather its suburbs) should deal with those on the margins. Sentaro (Nagase Masatoshi, best known in the west for Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Cold Fever and Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train), a dispirited vendor of dorayaki pancakes, merely goes through the motions every day, turning up to work in order to pay off debts (incurred by a past misdemeanour) to the owners of the tiny patisserie he manages.

Tokue (the Kore-eda regular Kirin Kiki, seen earlier this year in Our Little Sister), the mysterious 76-year-old woman he reluctantly takes on as his kitchen assistant, her passion inspiring a new sense of pride and purpose in his work, is soon revealed to be a resident of a nearby sanatorium for sufferers of Hansen’s disease, or leprosy. Meanwhile Wakana, a schoolgirl from a broken family, finds a home from home within the new Gemeinschaft that develops around the older woman’s artisanal recipe for the pancake’s an sweet-bean filling, honed over 50 years of domestic cooking.

Limiting the focus to these three characters works in the drama’s favour, certainly when compared with the typically meandering meditations on love, death and extended family life in Kawase’s previous work. And there are none of the nakedly autobiographical elements that have proved such a sticking point for viewers resistant to Kawase’s rather self-conscious, self-orientalising strain of auteurism.

These shifts in tone are best attributed to the fact that she is, unusually, adapting someone else’s work rather than developing an original story: the source material is the novel An by Sukegawa Durian, which deals with the very real but otherwise almost invisible issue of the outsider status of the several thousand leprosy patients currently housed in specialist sanatoriums across Japan. (Previous films broaching the subject include Toyoda Shiro’s Spring on Leper’s Island, 1940, Nomura Yoshitaro’s The Castle of Sand, 1974, and Kumai Kei’s To Love, 1997.)

or viewers unfamiliar with Kawase’s oeuvre, Sweet Bean provides a better entry point than its laboured predecessor, Still the Water, which last year became her first to receive UK distribution. Despite its more sentimental tone, aesthetically the new film adheres closely to the template she established at the beginning of her career, with the phases of the protagonists’ shifting relationships relayed as impressionist fragments of everyday life against the changing seasons.

The low-key documentary naturalism is well served by Akiyama Shigeki’s lucid cinematography, and the montage that plays out as Sentaro reads Tokue’s letter of farewell, expressing the old woman’s nativist connection to the earth, harks back to the lyrical visual poetry of Kawase’s early 8mm work – notably the touching portrait of the great aunt who raised her, Katatsumori (1994). But the director’s characteristically mawkish dialogue in the accompanying voiceover, waxing in quasi-mystical terms about the adzuki bean’s rite of passage from field to kitchen or “the soul of a dorayaki”, may leave some viewers wishing that the centre of this latest confection were a little less cloying.

– BFI.org.uk

https://nitro.download/view/1958D148AE78DF2/Naomi_Kawase_-(2015)_Sweet_Bean.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Naomi Kawase – An AKA Sweet Bean (2015) first appeared on Cinema of the World.