Films from Japan
This wide-ranging collection is brimming with horror and thrillers, romance, historical drama, hybrid films, and documentaries. Nagisa Oshima’s 100 Years of Japanese Cinema provides an entry point, taking us from Japanese silent cinema and through the postwar Golden Age to the Japanese New Wave, tracing the movement from melodrama to greater realism and beyond. Under the banner of Daiei Gothic, we present a Ghost Stories trilogy, including The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959), The Bride from Hades (1968), and The Snow Woman (1968). Other highlights include Rear Window rival Elegant Beast (1962) by Yuzo Kawashima, Shohei Imamura’s existential procedural A Man Vanishes (1967), Hirokazu Kore-eda’s fantasy romance Air Doll (2009), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s disturbing series Penance (2014), and the soberingly sinister Plan 75 by Chie Hayakawa (2022). The most recent entry is Hisayo Saika’s thought-provoking exposé on culture wars and growing government intervention in Education and Nationalism (2023) — an issue that touches not only Japan but countries all over the world.
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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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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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100 Years of Japanese Cinema (Nagisa Oshima)
Directed by Nagisa Oshima • Documentary • With William B. White, Nagisa Oshima • 1996 • 52 minutes
The forces and themes that have shaped his nation's cinema drive Nagisa Oshima's forceful and erudite essay. Based entirely on archive footage, it considers the rediscovery of Daisuke Ito's Chuji's...
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Tokyo Idols
Directed by Kyoko Miyake • Documentary • 2017 • 88 minutes
"IDOLS" has fast become a phenomenon in Japan as girl bands and pop music permeate Japanese life. TOKYO IDOLS—an eye-opening film gets at the heart of a cultural phenomenon driven by an obsession with young female sexuality and internet ...
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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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Nobuhiko Obayashi's Anti-War Trilogy
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In the last decade of his long and prolific career, Nobuhiko Obayashi (1938-2020) —best-known in the U.S. as the filmmaker behind the cult hit House (1977)—wrote and directed a trio of deeply personal and formally audacious films that confronted Japan’s wartime past.
Made in the wake of the Grea...
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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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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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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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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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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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The Ghost Of Yotsuya
Directed by Kenji Misumi • Drama • With Yasuko Nakada, Kazuo Hasegawa, Yoko Uraji • 1959 • 84 minutes
Samurai Iemon (Kazuo Hasegawa, Gate of Hell) has grown distant from his wife Oiwa since she miscarried. Oume falls madly in love with Iemon after he saves her from a group of drunk swordsmen. Wi...
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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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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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The Bride From Hades
Directed by Satsuo Yamamoto • Drama • With Kojiro Hongo, Mayumi Ogawa, Miyoko Akaza • 1968 • 89 minutes
Noble samurai Shinzaburo (Kojiro Hongo, Gamera) is visited one night by the beautiful courtesan Otsuyu (Miyoko Akaza, Lady Snowblood). She pleads with him to marry her and save her from life i...
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The Snow Woman
Directed by Tokuzo Tanaka • Drama • With Akira Ishihama, Shiho Fujimura, Machiko Hasegawa • 1968 • 80 minutes
Two woodcutters spend the night in a mountain lodge after being caught in a snowstorm. A female spirit appears and takes the life of one of the men. She spares the other man's life on th...
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Karayuki-San, The Making of a Prostitute
Directed by Shohei Imamura • Documentary • 1975 • 75 minutes
From the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, Japanese girls and women were trafficked out of Japan and sent to foreign countries like China, Singapore, and beyond to serve as indentured prostitutes. These women were called Karayuki-san.
Shoh...
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Red Persimmons
Directed by Shinsuke Ogawa, Peng Xiaolian • Documentary • 2001 • 90 minutes
The ostensible subject of this remarkably beautiful film is the growing, drying, peeling and packaging of persimmons in the tiny Japanese village of Kaminoyama. The inhabitants explain that it is the perfect combination ...
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Bright Future
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa • Drama • With Joe Odagiri, Tatsuya Fuji, Tadanobu Asano • 2003 • 115 minutes
"Casts its spell by drawing out the horror of everyday existence bit by bit, and then tossing in some otherworldly weirdness that makes the hair on the back of your neck try to run for cove...
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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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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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The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto
Directed by Kihachiro Kawamoto • Animation • 2014 • 99 minutes
Kimstim is proud to present this collection of short films from one of the world's greatest stop-motion animators: Kihachiro Kawamoto. Famous for his beautiful, expressive puppets, Kawamoto began his career in the 1950s. Honing his s...
