Quote:
The floating clouds between the high buildings, the lines of the taillights under the moonlight, the swirling human waves… Every view in Tokyo looks as if it is alive. Before even she realizes, TOUKO starts to run away from somewhere in the city. As an actress in a fantasy world, Touko seems to have lost her grip on reality. Along her journey, she makes acquaintance with people who carry similar issues. A midnight truck driver NAGANO, who happens to give Touko a ride, is grappling with the discovery of his soul, and his soul is unable to move forward. His escape from reality is to continually move from place to place. A movie theater manager KIKUCHI is uncertain of her life. She has moved to new surroundings but feels more lost than ever. A young job seeker at the zoo YASUKO has no faith in her future. She thinks that the luck is slipping away from her. During the extraordinary time they spend together Touko and the 3 characters start to feel a new awareness growing and discover a natural freedom. Together they feel the sense of change taking place. The moment they find the oasis within. Finally, Touko begins to walk again with lightened steps toward a new beginning of everyday life in Tokyo.

1.69GB | 1h 22m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/9A798EBC6AD8B35/Kana_Matsumoto_&_Kayo_Nakamura_-_(2011)_Tokyo_Oasis.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Kana Matsumoto & Kayo Nakamura – Tôkyô Oashisu aka Tokyo Oasis (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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A story of 6 days with 5 people gathered around a small sparkling pool at Chiang Mai in Thailand. 4 years ago, Kyoko started to live in Thailand and has been working in a Guest house outside in Chiang Mai, leaving her mother and her daughter Sayo, in Japan. Just before the graduation of University, Sayo sets foot on Thailand to visit her mother with mixed feelings. However, emotional experiences with the people living there changes such feelings toward her mother.

1.73GB | 1 h 36 min | 1024×552 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/E16D29CAA0DA87C/Mika_Ohmori_-_(2009)_Pool.mkv

Language:Japanese, Thai
Subtitles:English

The post Mika Ohmori – Pûru aka Pool (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
After reading a newspaper article about a town being destroyed in a fire, Eguchi begins to recall the summer he spent there writing his thesis. It’s a beautiful canal town, the “Venice of Japan.” As he arrives, he is greeted by the daughter of the Kaibara household, Yasuko. The rest of her family seems mysteriously absent. On his first night, Eguchi hears the stifled sound of crying. He attempts to find the source, and is soon drawn into the conflict that is tearing the family apart. While he likens the town to a dream, some of the inhabitants do not share his feelings. There is a sense of being stuck in time, with ruin and death the only future.

2.10GB | 1 h 45 min | 768×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/BD7EAC008A3E76E/Nobuhiko_Obayashi_-_(1984)_The_Deserted_City.mkv or https://nitroflare.com/view/DA48CF28A2BCC4E/Nobuhiko_Obayashi_-_%281984%29_The_Deserted_City.part1.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/4D706F9DA47ACC6/Nobuhiko_Obayashi_-_%281984%29_The_Deserted_City.part2.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/24AB9837CC09ED9/Nobuhiko_Obayashi_-_%281984%29_The_Deserted_City.part3.rar

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Nobuhiko Ôbayashi – Haishi AKA The Deserted City (1984) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

This hilarious movie catapults two youngsters hitting puberty into the opposite sex after a fall from which they recover in each other’s bodies. The timid sensitive girl becomes the effeminate insecure boy, and the unredeeming prankster becomes the loud clumsy girl with a chip on her shoulder. Both lead actors do tremendous jobs portraying the opposite sex, and often do so delivering more than a laugh. It ends in a bittersweet tone, but it is a really cute movie with hilarious moments.

1.96GB | 1 h 53 min | 700×437 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/964522016FDDF42/Transfer_Student.part1.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/16558A9E4F1CB7A/Transfer_Student.part2.rar

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Nobuhiko Ôbayashi – Tenkôsei AKA Exchange Students (1982) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

On a summer day, a small Japanese restaurant by the name of Ruokala Lokki (The Seagull Canteen) opens for business in the Punavuori district of Helsinki. The restaurant is run by 38-year-old Sachie who wishes to offer her Finnish patrons not only Japanese food but Japanese-style food for the soul, too. Attracting Finns to the small restaurant run by a lone Japanese woman proves quite difficult, however.

Luckily Sachie gets to know Midori and her restaurant’s only customer, Tommi Hiltunen, with the help of whom she slowly begins to bring in more customers and settle down in her new life. Kamome Shokudo is a charming little tale of people in the middle of a foreign culture. The film is based on a novel by popular Japanese writer Yoko Mure. Director Naoko Ogigami received an award at the Berlin International Film Festival for her previous film Barber Yoshino.

https://nitro.download/view/4FDBC808CEA63FD/Ruokala.Lokki.2006.Naoko.Ogigami.KG.avi

Language(s):Japanese & Finnish
Subtitles:English, hardsubbed

The post Naoko Ogigami – Kamome shokudo AKA Ruokala Lokki AKA The Seagull Diner (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A prize-winning author that wastes his money on gambling struggles to take back control of his existence as his aging mother and ex-wife move on with their lives, until a stormy summer night offers him a chance to bond with his young son once again.

Tara Judah wrote:
From sentiment to scenario and across his characters, places, imagery and impressions, Kore-eda’s films have a melancholic tonality that represents the aching of the human soul.

Familiar themes are revisited here including; broken families, the problem of the patriarch, strained relationships between fathers and sons, coming to terms with grief, as well as the unutterable bond that is created and strengthened through taking time to share a meal together.

Here, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) returns home after a patriarchal death in the family, hoping to find the strength to take up his own role within the flimsy structure of gendered society. The territory is well trodden as Abe played another son trying to become a symbol of the patriarch after a familial death, also named Ryota, in Kore-eda’s 2008 film, Still Walking.

Divorced, living in a tiny, unkempt apartment and spending more of his private detective income at the race track than on child support, Ryota is struggling to get a handle on life. Desperate for money but, unwittingly, even more desperate for the nourishment of his soul, Ryota must face the incoming typhoon with a strong heart, filled with what he does not have: honesty and resilience. It is not enough to blame “the times, this petty age we live in” for his shortcomings, we are told. Kore-eda wants us all – in the audience as much as his characters onscreen – to reflect upon the responsibilities we assume for both the beauty and harm we enact upon each other.

The film, as with his entire body of work, is peppered with succinct and telling character revelations that knowingly provide us with Kore-eda’s own voice, as a plea to the entirety of human kind; Yoshiko (Kirin Kiki), Ryota’s mother (for the second time, after Still Walking), is the spirited and surviving matriarch, and her comments are Kore-eda’s best, “A stew needs time for the flavours to sink in: so do people, ” and “You can’t find happiness until you’ve let go of something.” Thankfully, Kore-eda’s dialogue, no matter how blatantly or wilfully prophetic, is always self-aware, “I said something deep, didn’t I?” Yoshiko says and laughs, after pondering why she has never “loved someone deeper than the sea.”

But it is not the dialogue that makes the film so moving. Rather, it is that he finds subtle and poetic ways to show us the unfathomable hurt and incomprehensible love humans are capable of. We wound as well as we heal and no matter how painful the melancholy in his films can be, Kore-eda is a filmmaker in whose hands I would happily entrust my emotions every time. Through careful mid-shots and select close-ups, soft but not slow pacing and honest framing that allows the mise-en-scène to speak up without passing judgement; Kore-eda’s exploration of humanity is gentle even if the human behaviour is sometimes unkind.

Bilge Ebiri wrote:
It would be easy to make such material into a tragedy, a judgmental look at a man’s agonizing downfall. But for Kore-eda, this is just a glimpse of ordinary humanity. Shinoda’s setbacks aren’t all that different from the infidelities and failures he documents at his private-eye job. “For better or worse, it’s all part of my life,” says one woman who’s just discovered her husband is cheating on her. That gentle respect for human fallibility shines throughout After the Storm, as Kore-eda patiently charts the process by which Shinoda comes to understand that he will never become the man he wants to be — and learns to reconcile aspiration and acceptance.

Kore-eda’s stories, such as they are, unfold in unlikely ways. He doesn’t play so much with structure, but with focus: He’ll allow a scene to go on and on before slipping in a crucial bit of narrative information that leads to something else. In the hands of a lesser director, that could result in tedium, but Kore-eda’s love for his characters, his ability to imbue an exchange or glance with warmth and humor, keeps us watching. You can lose yourself in his films — wondering what’s around every corner, and what’s going on in the mind of even the most minor of characters.

Justin Chang wrote:
Set during an unusually active typhoon season, the film centers around Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), a divorced dad and onetime novelist who’s now eking out a living as a private investigator — a premise that initially sends out some intriguing noirish vibes. But Ryota’s detective work ultimately draws him back toward the family he’s long neglected, as he tries to bond with his young son (Taiyo Yoshizawa) and halfheartedly rekindle affections with his ex-wife (Yoko Maki). Nudging everyone gently from the sidelines is Ryota’s mother (Kirin Kiki, who previously starred with Abe in Kore-eda’s “Still Walking”).

After this film and his underrated “I Wish” (2011), it’s hard to think of another filmmaker who maps the emotional landscape of divorce-torn families as precisely as Kore-eda, who always steers his characters toward reconciliation and understanding without saccharine. Predicated on the revelatory power of shared meals and small talk, “After the Storm” builds to a scene of three people running around in a heavy downpour — a wistful, funny and indelible vision of a family coming together to chase an impossibly happy dream.

Hirokazu Koreeda - (2016) After the Storm.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 57mn
Size:	2.27 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	1024x560
Aspect ratio:	1.85:1
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	2 471 Kbps
Audio
Japanese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/456D8B42D6CCB28/Hirokazu_Koreeda_-_(2016)_After_the_Storm.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/3D3CC1B473B0839/Hirokazu_Koreeda_-_(2016)_After_the_Storm.EN.srt

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:Japanese,English

The post Hirokazu Koreeda – Umi yori mo mada fukaku AKA After the Storm (2016) first appeared on Cinema of the World.