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 and remedy fail her and her sense of dislocation and alienation intensifies, Ai resorts to a strange solution.
Videophobia unfolds as paranoid techno-thriller about identity, set on the backstreets of an industrial and multicultural Osaka captured here in beautiful, stark black-and-white. Concerns with obsessive image-making and issues of surveillance and consent in the digital age are embodied in the plight of a young woman from the city’s Koreatown; in an eerie film about the self – watching us as much as we watch it.
Up Next in Japan
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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...
