Ryô Kase

A geographic description of fourteen months of the work and non-work of Tayoko in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. A georgic in five books.Read More »

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The floating clouds between the high buildings, the lines of the taillights under the moonlight, the swirling human waves… Every view in Tokyo looks as if it is alive. Before even she realizes, TOUKO starts to run away from somewhere in the city. As an actress in a fantasy world, Touko seems to have lost her grip on reality. Along her journey, she makes acquaintance with people who carry similar issues. A midnight truck driver NAGANO, who happens to give Touko a ride, is grappling with the discovery of his soul, and his soul is unable to move forward. His escape from reality is to continually move from place to place. Read More »

Based on the life of movie director Keisuke Kinoshita.

As a young man, Keisuke Kinoshita (Ryo Kase) carried his mother on a handcart across a mountain. He grew up as a hotblooded young man and was monitored by the military. He then joined Shochiku movie company, to eventually become a movie director.Read More »

Kwon (Seo Young-hwa) returns to Seoul from a restorative stay in the mountains. She is given a packet of letters left by Mori (Ryo Kase), who has come back from Japan to propose to her. As she walks down a flight of stairs, Kwon drops and scatters the letters, all of which are undated. When she reads them, she has to make sense of the chronology… and so must we. Alternately funny and haunting, Hill of Freedom is a series of disordered scenes based on the letters, echoing the cultural dislocation felt by Mori as he tries to make himself understood in halting English. At what point did he drink himself into a lonely stupor? Did he sleep with the waitress from the “Hill of Freedom” café (Moon So-ri) before or after he despaired of seeing Kwon again?Read More »

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A story of 6 days with 5 people gathered around a small sparkling pool at Chiang Mai in Thailand. 4 years ago, Kyoko started to live in Thailand and has been working in a Guest house outside in Chiang Mai, leaving her mother and her daughter Sayo, in Japan. Just before the graduation of University, Sayo sets foot on Thailand to visit her mother with mixed feelings. However, emotional experiences with the people living there changes such feelings toward her mother.Read More »

This triptych of tales set in the titular city of Tokyo suggests an Eastern version of NEW YORK STORIES, but there is a significant difference: in this case, none of the three writer-directors (two French and one Korean) are natives; consequently, their short films emerge less as love letters to the city than as skewed points of view from outsiders looking in on what what they consider to be a strange, exotic land, bordering on a freak show. With their surreal touches, fanciful symbolism, and at least one outright refernce to Japanese kaiju cinema, TOKYO! emerges as a boderline genre effort – not quite a fantasy film but definitely a curious piece of cinefantatique. Unfortunately, the weirdness is not always entertaining – in some cases it is merely boring – but there is enough going on to make this interesting for fans of art house cinema.Read More »