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...

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-...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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)...

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...

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-...

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...

Directed by Kihachiro Kawamoto • Animation • 2014 • 70 minutes

Master animator Kihachiro Kawamoto's tour de force adventure tale of a young noble girl in 8th-century Japan who leaves her home to follow the apparition of an executed prince in this ravishing film of beauty and mysticism.

As Buddh...

Directed by Eric Khoo • Animation • With Tetsuya Bessho, Yoshihiro Tatsumi • 2011 • 98 minutes

TATSUMI celebrates the life and work of Japanese comics artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi-a manga pioneer who elevated the genre to a new level of creative expression and adult realism. A comics-crazed teenager...

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...

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...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa • Drama • With Hidetoshi Nishijima, Yûko Takeuchi, Toru Baba • 2017 • 130 minutes

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who made his name with classics CURE and BRIGHT FUTURE, gets back to his roots by putting the thumbscrews to the audience with his latest, CREEPY. A year after a botch...

Directed by Soichi Umezawa • Drama • With Ena Fujita, Yuyu Makihara, Momoka Sugimoto • 2017 • 81 minutes

From Japanese special effects master Soichi Umezawa comes a singular horror experience in a wildly hilarious marriage of The Blob and The Evil Dead. After studying in Tokyo, Kaori returns to ...

Directed by Hikaru Toda • Documentary • 2017 • 94 minutes

Openly gay life partners Fumi and Kazu run a small law firm in downtown Osaka, Japan, where Mary (Kazu's mother) works part time running errands for the two. Together for 15 years, it hasn't always been easy gaining acceptance, in a count...

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...

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...

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...