Shusei Tokuda’s starkly realistic novel about a poor girl pressed into becoming a geisha was forcefully adapted by Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba). When Ginko (Nobuko Otowa, Shindo’s wife) falls in love with one of her clients, she is handily rebuffed by the young man’s wealthy family, and left to wander from geisha house to geisha house.Read More »
Two teenage girls, one of them desperate to lose her virginity, take a hitchhiking road trip.Read More »
Pedro and Sol are two best friends that coming to age. Their personal paths drive them thru different directions. He’s interested in writing theatre, she’s training as piano player.Read More »
Written and directed by renowned Japanese filmmaker Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba, Hadaka no shima, Genbaku no ko), “Black Board” tells the story of middle school bullying taken to the point of homicide in this 1986 classic.Read More »
Cultures and families clash in Mira Nair’s exuberant Monsoon Wedding, a mix of comedy and chaotic melodrama concerning the preparations for the arranged marriage of a modern upper-middle-class Indian family’s only daughter, Aditi. Of course there are hitches—Aditi has been having an affair with a married TV host; she’s never met her husband to be, who lives in Houston; the wedding has worsened her father’s hidden financial troubles; even the wedding planner has become a nervous wreck—as well as buried family secrets. But Nair’s celebration is ultimately joyful and cathartic: a love song to her home city of Delhi and her own Punjabi family.Read More »
Teresa, 42, changes her vacation plans to spend the summer with her mother, Ani. The forced coexistence of living together after so many years brings tension as well as revealing moments for the two women accustomed to living alone.
2 wins, 1 nomination.Read More »
The world-famous woodblock artist Hokusai is a widower who lacks the ability to earn money, and he lives with his daughter Oei at the house of his friend, Bakin. Hokusai meets a woman called Onao and finds himself uncontrollably attracted to her, but she disappears all of a sudden. One day, an excited Oei brings home a young girl who looks exactly like Onao. Immediately, Hokusai starts to paint, using the young girl as a model. The illusion of Onao drives Hokusai back into the waves of youth as he painted the masterpiece of the gigantic octopus and the beauty being seduced, at the age of 90.Read More »
A young writer whose proposal was recently rejected goes to Greenland to spend a year at an outpost for hunting and trapping animals for furs. At the outpost he meets two men who are none too keen to spend the winter with the newcomer.Read More »
Director Jun Ichikawa spins this affectionate portrait of the people who populate Shimokitazawa, a bohemian corner of Tokyo filled with small theater companies and smoky coffeehouses.Read More »