One of the most sublime color films ever made, Ballad of Orin follows the hardscrabble life of a wandering outcast goze (blind female musician) in early 20th-century Japan. Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa and director Masahiro Shinoda interviewed surviving goza of the time to capture “a sense of the ideal beauty that these blind women had inwardly visualized.
Tag: JAPAN
Two drifters, Jun and Katsuhiro, dream of escaping Japan for Africa but end up stranded in a bleak fishing town in Hokkaido. There, they drift between odd jobs, drinking, and fleeting connections, including with a disillusioned woman, Fujiko. Their dream of Africa becomes less a destination than a symbol of escape from stagnation, as the film reflects on friendship, longing, and the quiet despair of lives lived on the margins.
Inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Terayama’s final and elaborate opus takes place on a remote Okinawan island, where a mythical time law rules and shapes memories, life and even death. Sutekichi and his cousin Su-e love each other, attracting the attention and insults of the superstitious inhabitants of an isolated village beyond time. When Sutekichi murders his rival Daisaku, the couple decides to flee from the village, but Sutekichi is haunted by Daisaku’s ghost and increasingly affected by the unforgiving course of time.
Sudo and Mori are two university students who make money by picking up rich girls in dance clubs and conning them into giving them cash. Mori is the brains of the operation, and Sudo is the suave dancer who picks up the girls. Over the course of the film, Sudo becomes involved with three different girls and is drawn into the gangster milieu, which he seems unable to resist even though he is responsible for his mother, grandmother, and sister, Masako. In this world of bad boys and girls, Masako is the pillar of strength and moral virtue who finally enables Mori to straighten out.
In the first part of the film, two young women live together and create their own eccentric adventures, transforming their (always rainy) everyday environment into an enchanted playground, full of pop-musical sequences and synchronized tooth brushing performances. As the second half of the film shifts to both deeper psychological themes and a more meta-filmic playfulness, Yaguchi develops a bewitchingly melancholic atmosphere of unpredictability.
Dario Argento meets the Marquis de Sade as sexploitation guru Norifumi Suzuki plunges us into a maelstrom of torture, secret masochistic desires and blasphemous rites. A young woman enters a convent to investigate the mysterious death of her mother. She soon discovers a smorgasbord of vice as she’s abused by lecherous archbishops, a lesbian mother superior and a line of fellow nuns ready to whip her (in the film’s most deliriously over-the-top scene) with rose-thorns.
Japanese sixties comedy featuring a cunning female jewel thief named Black Lizard who tries to kidnap Sanaye, a wealthy jeweler’s beautiful daughter as part of a plot to steal the jeweler’s expensive “Star of Egypt” diamond. To thwart the planned kidnapping, the jeweler hires Japan’s number one detective, the brilliant Akechi. This sets off a dual between Black Lizard and Akechi as each tries to outwit the other. In the process, the two adversaries develop a mutual respect and affection for each other.
Four year old Jairan is ignored at home, and is itching for something to do. She convinces her neighbour, an old lady who is partially blind, that the two of them should travel across one of the world’s busiest cities, Tehran, to buy rice. What could possibly go wrong? A gentle take on Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Talebi’s disarming film starts as an odd-couple adventure, then opens out into something profound and unforgettable.