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Videophobia
Directed by Daisuke Miyazaki • Drama • With Sumire Ashina • 2019 • 89 minutes
Ai (a super Tomona Hirota) haunts the streets of Osaka dressed as a mascot. After going home with a stranger, she wakes up to find footage of their intimate encounter uploaded to a porn site. As all systems of recourse...
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Beijing Watermelon
Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi • Drama • With Bengal, Masako Motai • 1989 • 135 minutes
Shunzo (Bengal) and his wife Michi (Masako Motai) run a beloved greengrocer on the outskirts of Tokyo. When Lee, a struggling exchange student from China, visits the shop but is unable to afford the produce, a...
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Tattooed Life
Directed by Seijun Suzuki • Drama • With Hideki Takahashi, Masako Izumi • 1965 • 87 minutes
Tetsuo (Hideki Takahashi, Fighting Elegy), a low-level yakuza is double-crossed by his boss and attacked. His younger brother Kenji (Kotobuki Hananomoto, This Transient Life), an aspiring artist with no c...
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The Witches of the Orient
Directed by Julien Faraut • Documentary • 2021 • 100 minutes
How did a group of humble factory workers become a phenomenal sports success story and the pride of an entire nation? Julian Faraut's (John McEnroe: In The Realm of Perfection) ferociously innovative and visually stunning The Witches o...
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The Making of a Japanese
Directed by Ema Ryan Yamazaki • Documentary • 2024 • 99 minutes
From the director of Koshien: Japan's Field of Dreams and the Oscar-nominated Documentary short, Instruments of a Beating Heart, comes a heartfelt exploration of Japanese identity as seen through the perspective of schoolchildren.
...
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The Pavilion on the Water
Directed by Stefano Croci, Silvia Siberini • Documentary • 2023 • 77 minutes
The documentary feature film The Pavilion On The Water is a cinematic journey into the world of Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa and his passion for Japanese culture. Japan, to him, was an inspirational universe but also...
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Tokijiro: Lone Yakuza
Directed by Tai Kato • Drama • With Junko Ikeuchi, Chiyonosuke Azuma, Kinnosuke Nakamura • 1966 • 90 minutes
Weary of the rigid codes of the underworld, gambler Tokijiro (Kinnosuke Nakamura, Goyokin) wanders Japan in search of freedom. But escape proves to be impossible when an obligation to a g...
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Underworld Beauty
Directed by Seijun Suzuki • Drama • With Michitaro Mizushima, Shinsuke Ashida, Mari Shiraki • 1958 • 87 minutes
Retrieving the diamonds he stashed before his arrest, thief Miyamoto hopes to help his old partner Mihara, crippled during the heist. Their former boss, crime lord Oyane, offers to med...
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Yokohama BJ Blues
Directed by Eiichi Kudo • Drama • With Yusaku Matsuda, Hyoe Enoki, Mari Hemmi • 1981 • 112 minutes
When his police detective best friend is killed, down-at-heel private eye and part-time blues singer BJ (Yusaku Matsuda, The Game Trilogy) gets the blame. He must start his own investigation to cle...
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Japan Organized Crime Boss
Directed by Kinji Fukasaku • Drama • With Kôji Tsuruta, Noboru Andô • 1969 • 97 minutes
Two major yakuza factions from Tokyo and Osaka battle over control of Yokohama, using local gangs as their proxies. Amid this violent struggle, Tsukamoto, the head of one of the local gangs, is released from ...
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Eighteen Years In Prison
Directed by Tai Kato • Drama • With Noboru Andô, Shinobu Chihara, Asao Koike • 1967 • 90 minutes
Trying to survive in the ruins of post-war Japan, Kawada (Noboru Ando, By a Man's Face Shall You Know Him) and Tsukada (Asao Koike, Sympathy the Underdog) run afoul of the military police after steal...
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Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat In Space
Directed by t.o.L • Animation • With Takeshi Katô, Hisayo Mochizuki • 2002 • 92 minutes
Arguably the only Japanese anime ever made inspired by both Hello Kitty and Thomas Pynchon, TAMALA 2010 is a futuristic techno fever dream that follows the adorable wide-eyed kitty Tamala on her home world of...
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The Birth of Sake
Directed by Erik Shirai • Documentary • 2015 • 93 minutes
A beautiful and immersive portrait of life at the 144-year old Yoshida Brewery, a producer of world class sake. With changing times ahead and new regime led by the 6th generation heir, this is a rarified look at the personal and professio...
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Plan 75
Directed by Chie Hayakawa • Drama • With Chieko Baishô, Hayato Isomura • 2022 • 113 minutes
In a near dystopian future, Japan’s government launches PLAN 75, a program encouraging the elderly to terminate their own lives to relieve its rapidly aging population’s social and economic burdens. In Ch...
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Elegant Beast
Directed by Yuzo Kawashima • Drama • With Ayako Wakao, Eiji Funakoshi, Yûko Hamada • 1962 • 96 minutes
In their humble two-room apartment, the Maeda family seem ever so self-effacing - but their modest façade hides another truth. Daughter Tomoko is the mistress of a bestselling author with well-...
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Casting Blossoms to the Sky
Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi • Drama • With Yasuko Matsuyuki, Masahiro Takashima, Natsuki Harada, • 2012 • 160 minutes
In 2011, a journalist arrives in Nagaoka, a Japanese village that underwent destruction during both World War II and the 2004 Chūetsu earthquakes, and is now notable for the f...
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Seven Weeks
Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi • Drama • With Toru Shinagawa, Takako Tokiwa, Yumi Adachi, Hirona Yamazaki, Shunsuke Kubozuka, Shusaku Uchida, Takehiro Murata, • 2014 • 171 minutes
At 2:46 PM on March 11, 2013, Mitsuo Suzuki takes his last breath at the ripe old age of 92. As the patriarch’s far-...
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Hanagatami (Nobuhiko Ōbayashi)
Directed by Nobuhiko Ōbayashi • Drama • With Shunsuke Kubozuka, Tokio Emoto • 2017 • 169 minutes
In 2016, Nobuhiko Obayashi, the director of the cult Japanese film HAUSU was diagnosed with lung cancer and given only a few months to live. Despite not much time left, for what was supposed to be hi...
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A Man Vanishes
Directed by Shohei Imamura • Documentary • 1967 • 130 minutes
One of the most important and complex works by two-time Palme d'Or winning director Shohei Imamura, A MAN VANISHES begins as an investigation into one of the thousands of missing persons cases that occur in Japan each year.
The film ...
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Air Doll (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda • Drama • With Bae Doona, Arata Iura, Itsuji Itao • 2009 • 116 minutes
A present-day fable for the increasing disconnect we find in urban life, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll transports the Galatea myth to present day Tokyo.
A life-size sex doll (Bae Doona, The Host)...
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Education and Nationalism
Directed by Hisayo Saika • Documentary • 2023 • 108 minutes
A group of uniformed Japanese schoolchildren make their way to class. But what they will be taught when they get there is a subject increasingly under government scrutiny.
EDUCATION AND NATIONALISM traces growing government interventio...
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We Are Little Zombies
Directed by Makoto Nagahisa • Drama • With Keita Ninomiya, Mondo Okumura, Satoshi Mizuno, Sena Nakajima • 2019 • 120 minutes
When four young orphans—Hikari, Ikuko, Ishi, and Takemura—first meet, their parents’ bodies are being turned into dust, like fine Parmesan atop a plate of spaghetti Bologn...
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Maborosi (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda • Drama • With Makiko Esumi, Tadanobu Asano • 1995 • 110 minutes
One of the finest films of Japanese cinema, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first feature film Maborosi is a story of love, loss, and ultimately, regeneration.
Haunted by the mysterious loss of her grandmother m...
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Shusenjo: Comfort Women and Japan's War on History
Directed by Miki Dezaki • Documentary • 2019 • 120 minutes
One of the most heated issues in Japan and Asia today is over something that occurred 80 years ago: the Japanese Imperial Army's sexual enslavement of an estimated tens of thousands of Korean women and others in military brothels during ...
