PLOT: Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man who shows a low self esteem, shares her family life with her budding vocation as a poetess. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides with her divorce and the development of a serious illness: a breast cancer, which leads her to lose her breasts. In the last stage of her life she meets a young journalist arrived from Tokyo, an admirer of her work, who wants to write a story on her life.Read More »
A 21-year-old girl is released from prison, only to deal with the neighborhood gossip about her and family conflicts. She decides to save one million yen, move to where no one knows her and keep repeating the process.Read More »
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Set in the mountains of rural Nara prefecture, the film centers on the Tahara family who eke out a living from the local ancient cedar forests. The head of the family, Kyozo, becomes fixated by plans to build a tunnel to improve the accessibility of the area. Construction begins, but is halted halfway through. Fifteen years later building has still not restarted, and the family is destitute. Against this backdrop, some family affairs develop. Kyozo’s daughter, Michiru, starts to fall in love with Eisuke, her cousin. Eisuke, meanwhile, finds himself attracted to his aunt.Read More »
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This film was born of a theatrical production of Nastasya Filipovna, first staged in 1977 at the Stary Teatr in Cracow. I based my adaptation on the last chapter of Fyodor Dostoyevski’s The Idiot, in which Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin return to the past in a conversation over the dead body of Nastasja.
For years I was tormented by apprehension, and later, by certainty that there exists some better solution for a stage version of The Idiot. Finally chance came to my aid. When in 1981 I visited Kyoto, I saw a performance of La Dame aux Camélias. In this way I met Tamasaburo Bando, one of the greatest Japanese performers of female roles.Read More »
Synopsis:
Ume (Kyoko Kishida) and Kame (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) are two elderly sisters who live in a large house packed with discarded items they find while rummaging through trash in their town. One day, the two women find some red yarn and bring it home. That evening, the women discover a young girl (Ayu Kitaura) who has entered their home and knitting a sweater with their red wool. Who is this girl?Read More »
Made while director Kaori Oda was studying at Béla Tarr’s Film.Factory in Sarajevo, Aragane is, on the surface, a documentary about a Bosnian coalmine. As Oda takes us underground, the surroundings are illuminated solely by the available light of the miners’ headlamps, creating a state of sensual semi-blindness that both attunes us to the dangers of the mine and — with the beams cutting arcs of light through the blackness and casting shadows on the cavern walls — becomes an organic metaphor for the roots of cinema itself. It is not surprising that commentators have drawn similarities between Oda’s work and that of Harvard’s renowned Sensory Ethnography Lab: as in such films as Leviathan and Manakamana, in Aragane Oda attempts to understand her subjects through an embodied presence that moves beyond distanced knowledge and towards intimate entanglement.Read More »
Takako (Akiko Kikuchi) is going steady with the man of her dreams who surprises her with the news that he is married. Hurtled into shock by the startling news, Takako takes up her uncle’s invitation to work at the Morisaki book store. While uninterested at first, she gradually comes to like and read books and get to know the neighbourhood and the people who work in it.Read More »
17-year-old Salya grew up in Japan from an early age, leaving the place where she was born with a Kurdish family. She lived a normal high school life, just like the Japanese of her generation, and her relationship with Sota is becoming special but at some point she lost her status of residence in the shape of her life’s upside down. In Saitama, there is an area where about 2000 Kurds live, and Salya is a high school girl who lives there. However, when she learns that her family’s refugee status is turned down, restricting her family of work and travelling across the city. Her father, who had continued to work to sustain a living, is taken into custody for illegal employment. It tells the story of her growing up, suddenly being forced into a situation where she is responsible not only for her younger siblings but for her very existence.Read More »
Director Tanada Yuki offers a frank depiction of sexuality at 17 in her brilliant adaptation of Saso Akira’s coming-of-age manga. Charging forward with all the stagnant urgency and high-strung awkwardness of adolescence, “Ain’t No Tomorrows” weaves three episodes of high school angst and sexual awakening. Sex-obsessed virgin Hiruma (Emoto Tokio, Your Friends) desperately pursues a sickly classmate (Miwako). His buddy Mine (Endo Yuya, Nodame Cantabile) becomes the unlikely savior for a naive schoolgirl (Ando Sakura, Love Exposure), and chubby Ando (Kusano Ini) unexpectedly scores with the class beauty (Misaki Ayame, Ghost Friends).Read More »