Japanese soldier Tôsuke Kosugi deserts his position and travels to a small town on the Sea of Japan to start over in this melodrama from director Masahiro Shinoda. When a young maid falls for him, he talks her into sleeping with an older man for money. The woman is told by a geisha that she gave up her virginity cheaply. The resort town begins to feel the influence of the modern world as the sabre-rattling that preceded World War II begins to change their lives forever.
Tag: JAPAN
Set in the bull-fighting Patani Malay community of Southern Thailand. An ungracious loser in the arena kills his rival, whose brother Mamat then vows to get even. His wife Minah fails to stop this cycle of vengeance, which will also affect the younger generation.
After wandering into a cemetery, a young man named Shusei is led by the mysterious Madame Enjoji to a secluded mansion. There, he is introduced to Aido, an ethereal woman who seems to be the living embodiment of his most surreal erotic fantasies. Caught between the real world and a haunting dreamscape, Shusei becomes obsessed with Aido.
After his parent’s divorce, Kazuo Saito moves with his mother from Onomichi and must leave his girlfriend behind. At his new school, Kazuo is surprised to reunite with his childhood friend Kazumi. Obayashi’s self-remake of Tenkôsei.
Set in a cave imagined as an air-raid shelter, images of the surrounding trees are painted over directly on the film. Vivid colors intermixed with the sound of wartime radio communications and bombing create a harmonious composition of documentary and animation.
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.
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.