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Haunted By Recurring Apparitions, A Young Girl Embarks On A Supernatural Journey To A Tsunami-ravaged Japan In Search Of Her Mother In This Poignant Drama About Love And Loss

The New Director's Award-nominee At San Sebastian Makes Its North American Premiere On SVOD Service Indiepix Unlimited On September 13, 2024

Synopsis

Haunted by recurring apparitions, sixteen-year-old Ami (Mihaya Shirata) embarks on a supernatural journey from Singapore to Japan in search of her mother who went missing during a cataclysmic tsunami. Upon her arrival in Tokyo, she meets Isamu (Masatoshi Nagase), her cynical taxi-driving uncle, who becomes her custodian and reluctant guide through the ravaged landscape and her family's dark past.

Set against the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku tsunami and shot mostly in Rikuzentakata, a city almost wiped out during the tsunami, Last Shadow At First Light is a “post-apocalyptic story of survivors' trauma” (The Film Verdict) that reckons with lingering family trauma.

Based on a story by Leonard Schrader, who also wrote “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” and “The Man Who Stole the Sun”, “P.P. Rider” shares many similarities with “Sailor Suit and Machine Gun” particularly in the way it combines school students with yakuza. It is also worth mentioning that Somai's initial cut was four hours long, but he had to cut it in half in order to be presented as a double feature with “Urusei Yatsura: Only You”.

P. P Rider is screening on Metrograph

The film starts with a rather impressive long sequence which introduces us to the main characters and the event that the story centers on, with the chaos that ensues from the beginning essentially setting the tone for the whole movie. Nobunaga Deguchi seems to be the most obese kid in his classroom in highschool, but he also happens to be its bully, as...

The concept of the underdog that reaches the top out of nowhere, particularly in sports, has been one of the most popular tropes in international cinema, especially when combined with a sense of nostalgia and a true story, with Hollywood having essentially exhausted the whole concept during the 80s and 90s. Umin Boya follows the same path in “Kano”, which is based on the homonymous, multiracial baseball team from Chiayi, in the Japanese-era Taiwan, that ended up representing the island in the 1931 Japanese High School Baseball Championship at Koshien Stadium. The film, which features well-known Japanese stars and an army of young Taiwanese athletes (and a few Japanese ones) won a number of awards in Asia, and was also a huge box office success, still holding the 6th place in the list of the highest grossing domestic Taiwanese films of all time.

on Amazon by clicking on...

The upcoming 74th Berlin Film Festival looks set to be its starriest edition in years with Kristen Stewart, Adam Sandler, Cillian Murphy, Lena Dunham, Sebastian Stan, Amanda Seyfried and Rooney Mara among the talent due to attend this year.

Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian confirmed the actors’ presence in an interview with Deadline following the festival’s official press conference on Monday.

“Yes. All the stars we have invited are expected to be here and have confirmed their presence,” he said, when quizzed on the above names. “I think the glamor aspect on the red carpet is a good one this year.”

Most are attending in movies due to be showcased in the Berlinale Special Gala line-up.

Stewart, who was at the festival last year as jury president, returns for the Berlinale Special Gala screening of Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding alongside Katy O’Brian, Ed Harris, Dave Franco and Jena Malone.

The Berlin Film Festival today unveiled further titles for the 2024 edition of its Berlinale Special Presentations sidebar section alongside its classics program. Scroll down for the full list of titles announced today.

Highlights from the latest drop of Specials titles include Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, a feature documentary about influential British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger narrated by Killers of the Flower Moon filmmaker Martin Scorsese. The feature is directed by David Hinton and features rare archival material from the personal collections of Powell, Pressburger, and Scorsese.

Love Lies Bleeding, the latest feature from British filmmaker Rose Glass will debut in the Specials program. The feature stars Kristen Stewart alongside Katy O’Brian. A short synopsis describes the pic as “a romance fueled by ego, desire, and the American Dream.” The film will arrive at Berlin following it’s debut at Sundance.

Abel Ferrara is...

It was kind of an unspoken (probably) agreement among artists from Japan, to not deal extensively with the events of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, for ten years, probably as a sign for respect for the ones lost and the ones who suffered due to the events. Since 2021 though, the local industry has started focusing on the events intently, with a number of movies and dramas being released since then. “Last Shadow at First Light” also moves in the same path, in an international co-production involving people from Singapore, Japan, Slovenia, Philippines and Indonesia, which premiered at the 71st San Sebastián International Film Festival in September.

Last Shadow at First Light screened at Qcinema

16-year-old Ami is a girl living with her father in Singapore, after her mother's death when she was little. Both of them miss her intensely, with him having embarked in a kind of solemn silence in...

Singaporean writer-director Nicole Midori Woodford is on a roll with her debut feature, Last Shadow At First Light, which premiered in New Directors at San Sebastian film festival and has two nominations at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSAs) for best screenplay and best performance (Mihaya Shirata).

Filmed in Singapore and Japan, the film follows a Singaporean teenage girl with a special connection to the spiritual world who goes on a road trip to uncover the mystery of her Japanese mother’s supposed death. She has been told her mother died by suicide during the recovery effort following the Japan 2011 earthquake and tsunami that killed her maternal grandparents. But she doesn’t believe this to be true.

Meeting up with an uncle in Tokyo, they travel together to a town that was swept away by the tsunami although her uncle is more interested in the local pachinko parlour than helping with the quest.

The American Film Market kicks off Oct. 31 and runs through Nov. 5 in its new headquarters at the Le Meridien Delfina in Santa Monica. Industry screenings are set at theaters throughout the city and AFM’s conference series, the AFM Sessions, will take place at the Hilton Santa Monica Hotel. More than 245 companies and organizations are exhibiting at this year’s AFM, with national pavilions from China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Thailand and the U.K. In all, buyers from more than 65 countries are registered at the film market.

Here are some of the buzziest titles at AFM 2023:

Alphas

Director: Liam O’Donnell

Producers: Pierre Morel, Renee Tab, Christopher Tuffin, Matthew Chausse, Drew Bailey

Key cast: Martin Henderson

Story is set in a quiet surfing community where killer whales are enlisted to fend off great white sharks after a series of attacks. When the alpha great white shark proves too powerful to stop,...

Horror has come into its own in the 21st century. This is not to say that the genre has ever not been one of the most interesting and creative in the long history of cinema. Since nearly the beginning of the art form, using moving images to scare audiences has been a gateway for aspirin filmmakers to break into the industry—or for even veterans to creatively something about the greater world by painting a landscape of anxiety.

Nonetheless, the 21st century (particularly beginning in its second decade) has brought a renewed appreciation for scary movies’ abilities to speak to audiences with more than just “boo.” With that in mind, we at Den of Geek have polled our staff and collected the below list of what we generally consider to be the best chillers of the fast quarter-century or so. Enjoy.

42. Land of the Dead (2005)

Land of the Dead does...

In her feature debut, director Nicole Midori Woodford explores the aftermath of an apocalyptic event and examines how trauma leaves an indelible mark on its survivors that ripple onto close family relationships. Crafting evocative atmospheres and elemental textures as metaphors for hauntings, hallucinations and dreams, the director delicately weaves the supernatural and the lyrical into a coming-of-age road trip of a teenager yearning to uncover the reason for her mother’s vanishing in Japan. Starring the acclaimed Masatoshi Nagase, Mariko Tsutsui, Peter Yu, and newcomer Mihaya Shirata.

Ryuhei Kitamura has had a rather interesting career. Starting with some of the cult titles of the 00s, including “Versus”, “Azumi” and “LoveDeath”, he then shot a Godzilla and a “Lupin The Third” film, then he moved to Hollywood to shoot films with Ruby Rose and Jean Reno among others, and now he is back with “Three Sisters of Tenmasou”, a manga adaptation that shows his most sensitive side as of now.

Three Sisters of Tenmasou is screening at Japan Cuts

The particular manga is “Tenmasou no Sanshimai: Sky High” by Tsutomu Takahashi (published from 2013 to 2014 by Young Jump Comics) and revolves around the said inn, a quaint out-of-time place in the small port town of Mitsuse. The establishment functions as a stopping point for people on the verge of death to decide if they want to return to the world of the living, where they are in a coma from an accident or illness,...

Takeshi Fukunaga has proven himself to be one of Japan's most exciting directors in recent years, receiving accolades for both “Out of My Hand” (2015) and “Ainu Mosir” (2020). His latest project, “Mountain Woman”, marks the director's first-period piece, as he takes us back to 18th-century Tohoku. A tale of famine, strife, and survival, the film is a sensitive and uncompromising meditation on finding oneness and liberation.

Mountain Woman is screening at Nippon Connection

In a rural village in feudal Japan, a poor harvest has yielded a dire famine. Rin (Anna Yamada) and her family are at the bottom of the food chain, outcast by their fellow villagers on account of a past crime. When tensions come to a head, and Rin's father, Ihei (Masatoshi Nagase), finds himself in trouble, she is driven away from the village and into the nearby Mount Hayachine, a place to which the spirits of the dead are said to ascend.

Late 18th century, Tohoku. An outcast girl, Rin lives in a village suffering from famine. She draws strength from Mt. Hayachine, where the spirits of humans ascend after passing. (Source: Tokyo International Film Festival)

Directed by Takeshi Fukunaga (Out of My Hand), this movie premiered on October 25, 2022 at the Tokyo International Film Festival. It stars Anna Yamada, Mirai Moriyama and Masatoshi Nagase. Theatrical release in Japan is scheduled for June 30, 2023.

Happinet Phantom Studios to launch the project at the Cannes market.

Japan’s Happinet Phantom Studios is to launch sales at the Cannes market on an adaptation of The Box Man, directed by influential filmmaker Gakuryu Ishii and starring Masatoshi Nagase.

The 1973 novel was written by Kobo Abe and follows a nameless man who gives up his identity to live with a large cardboard box over his head, encountering a range of characters as he wanders the streets of Tokyo

Filming will begin this summer in Japan with a cast that includes Nagase, whose credits include Jim Jarmusch’s Cannes 2016 Competition title Paterson,...

After “Shark Skin Man and the Peach Hip Girl”, director Katsuhito Ishii had established himself as one of the many new, unique voices within the Japanese film industry. The adaptation of Minetaro Mochizuki's manga also managed to raise some eyebrows internationally and displayed the filmmaker's style as well as the themes he wanted to talk about, namely the contrast of make-believe and reality, which has become quite blurry over time, especially due to the rise of social media. In his next project “Party 7”, Ishii would venture deeper into this theme, while also expanding his use of the language of cinema, creating yet another unique and creative feature about the lies we tell ourselves and others, and how they become real in the end.

on Terracotta

Chased by the members of his gang, Miki (Masatoshi Nagase) seeks refuge in the hotel New Mexico, a place well-hidden from any tourists and visitors,...

Sometimes, when two people with very different experiences meet, it is not enough simply to arrive at the same place in space and time; each must still undertake a journey to find the other.

Misako (Ayame Misaki) makes her living by providing various forms of assistance to blind and visually impaired people. She’s trying to break into the art of audio description for films, but it’s difficult. Whilst other blind people try to be polite, photographer Masaya Nakamori (Masatoshi Nagase) gives it to her straight: he doesn’t think that she’s cut out for it. She’s too poetic. Her subjective emotions get in the way of allowing blind audience members to use their imaginations, whilst she makes so many observations that there’s no opportunity left for quiet contemplation.

Nakamori badly needs that kind of space. He’s struggling to come to terms with the gradual loss of his sight,...

From the late ’50s and into the 1970s the Japanese New Wave exhibited an incredible creative outburst that defined and shaped what we consider contemporary Japanese cinema. But most studious critics have labeled what came after, the 1980s, as the “lost decade” of Japanese filmmaking, where no major directors or movements came to the forefront in either the home country or worldwide. Nevertheless, there’s been a recent surge of reconsideration of that period, mainly through retrospectives and restorations, like the one put together by Japan Society on Shinji Somai, one of the most important, eclectic directors who got his start in that epoch.

“Rites of Passage: The Films of Shinji Somai” features seven of the director’s early features, made between 1981 and 1990, which cemented his style. As the name of the retrospective and its accompanying description by its programmers hint, Somai cut his teeth into the seishun eiga (youth film) genre,...

On the heels of Naomi Kawase’s 2014 feature Still the Water getting distribution in North America from Film Movement, the distributor has now announced the Japanese director’s 2017 drama Radiance will get a release at the end of this month. Following a world premiere in competition at Cannes where it received the Ecumenical Jury Prize, we’re pleased to exclusively premiere the new U.S. trailer ahead of its April 28 debut.

Here’s the synopsis: “Misako (Ayame Misaki) is a writer of audio descriptions of films for the visually impaired. At a screening, she meets Nakamori (Masatoshi Nagase), an older photographer who is slowly losing his eyesight following an illness. Misako soon discovers Nakamori’s photographs, which will strangely bring her back to her past. Though hesitant to start a relationship, feelings soon arise between a man who has lost the light and a woman who pursues it.”

Kawase, whose...

Stars: Tadanobu Asano, Masatoshi Nagase | Written and Directed by Sogo Ishii

Electric Dragon 80.000 V’s opening narration, delivered by Masakatsu Funaki, informs us that dragons are not mythical creatures, they exist with the bodies of men. That’s followed by scenes of a young boy climbing an electrical pylon only to get a massive shock from the high-tension wires.

This does something to the part of his brain that “we inherited unchanged from lizards” and results in Dragon Eye Morrison frequently getting in trouble for fighting. Attempts to cure it with electric shock therapy only make it worse, turning him into a walking battery. Now an adult he collects lizards and plays guitar to work out his aggression. As the narrator puts it “what saved him from ruin was…The Electric Guitar” as we watch him play.

But ruin in the form of Thunderbolt Buddha has come looking for him.

Stars: Go Ayano, Koen Kondo, Masahiro Higashide, Jun Kunimura, Etsushi Toyokawa, Masatoshi Nagase | Written by Kankurô Kudô | Directed by Gakuryû Ishii

”It was a somewhat gloomy day”. Thus begins Punk Samurai, director Gakuryû, formerly Sogo, Ishii and writer Kankurô Kudô’s adaptation of Kou Machida’s supposedly unfilmable novel.

Junoshin Kake wanders into the domain of the Kurokaze clan and promptly kills a beggar who approaches him. He tells Shume Nagaoka a low-level official in the clan, that the man was a member of a dangerous religious cult that only he can save them from. That’s enough to create the opening he needs to find a permanent position in Lord Kuroae’s employ.

Kake plans to exploit the rivalry between two of the clan’s top retainers Shuzen Oura and Tatewaki Naito to rise through the ranks. The only problem is, the cult, The Bellyshaker Party no longer exists and Naito knows it.

Dementia seems to be the name of the game in cinema over the course of recent years. After Richard Glatzer’s and Wash Westmoreland’s effort “Still Alice” (2014) that took Julianne Moore to her first and so far only Oscar for playing the titular character, an academic who has to deal with the illness that will rapidly take her greatest asset, and even more impressive Florian Zeller’s stage play adaptation “The Father” (2020) that brought Anthony Hopkins his second Academy Award for the role, the Japanese novelist and producer Genki Kawamura took his own novel on the same topic as a source for his feature-length directorial debut. After the premiere at San Sebastian and the tour of festivals in East and Southeast Asia, “A Hundred Flowers” was screened at Belgrade International Film Festival.

On New Year’s Eve, and just before her birthday, retired piano teacher Yuriko Kasai (Mieko Harada...

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At the close of the 18th century, a long and devastating famine swept across the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan. The cause was a volcano eruption, followed by several years of catastrophically bad weather. The result was close to a million deaths from starvation.

Such is the setting for Mountain Woman, a bleak period drama from writer-director Takeshi Fukunaga that uses the famine as a backdrop to depict one young woman’s harrowing quest for survival. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Daniel Satinoff (who worked on the HBO Max series Tokyo Vice), the film has its moments of haunting visual poetry, but tends to get weighed down by a lumbering plot and a fair amount of pathos.

Fukunaga broke through in the U.S. in 2015 with his debut, Out of My Hand, which was nominated for an Independent Spirit award and was released by Ava DuVernay’s Array label.

Winner of the audience award in last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, “Just Remembering” channels a number of elements from Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth” but also includes a very interesting role reversal element and unusual approach to the timeline of the story.

“Just Remembering” is screening at London East Asia Film Festival (Leaff)

Teruo is a former dancer who suffers from an injury on his leg that has forbidden him from dancing, and now works as a light technician for a theater company, although he is not exactly great at his job. Yo is a taxi driver (concluding the role reversal element), and a fan of Winona Ryder’s segment in the aforementioned movie, and also Teruo’s former girlfriend. Through a series of flashbacks mostly taking place around July 26, Teruo’s birthday, their backstory is revealed, as much as the background of a middle-aged man always...

Fresh from his Netflix success with “Ride or Die”, a film that everyone seems to have seen for different reasons, Ryuichi Hiroki continues his exploration of the concept of crime and punishment in a completely different setting, the closed community of a small fictional island.

Noise is screening at Asian Pop Up Cinema

The story is adapted from the homonymous manga by Tetsuya Tsutsui and begins with a middle-aged local driving a stranger around the island, before the latter strangles him for no apparent reason. A bit later, the stranger ends up in the property of Keita Izumi, the “star of the island”, since his black figs are about to feature on a TV program that also comes with a big government grant that will help the declining economy of the area. The first interaction ends up without any happenings, but soon Keita’s daughter disappears. The aggravated father seeks...

Director of some of the best Japanese movies we have seen after 2010, with titles like “The Great Passage” and “The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue” under his belt, Yuya Ishii seems, however, to be experiencing an out of form recently, with his last works being interesting, but not on the same level with the aforementioned, for example. Let us see how he fared with his latest work, “A Madder Red”.

“A Madder Red” is screening at Nippon Connection

The film begins with a car crash that sends Yoichi, lead singer of a band, husband of Ryoko and father of a young boy named Junpei, to death. 7 years later, the boy is now a middle school student who is facing bullying for his mother’s work, since the fact that she is a sexual worker seems to have been revealed. Ryoko, however, also covers the expenses of her father-in-law,...

Atsushi Omori’s interest in the various aspects of religion became evident from his “blasphemous” debut, “Whispering of the Gods”, back in 2005. Although his style has developed exponentially since then, the interest on the topic and of people living on the borders of society remained, and “Under the Stars” highlights the fact in the most eloquent fashion.

“Under the Stars” is screening at Nippon Connection

The story is based on Natsuko Imamura’s novel “Hoshi No Ko” and revolves around Chihiro, who, as the movie begins, is a baby suffering from eczema. Her parents try to find a cure, but nothing works. That is until a colleague of her father gives him some water from a strange religious group that eventually is proven to be a cult. Chihiro is actually cured, and her parents begin to follow this religion, becoming fervent followers. Years later, Chihiro is a student in the...

Winner of the audience award in last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, “Just Remembering” channels a number of elements from Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth” but also includes a very interesting role reversal element and unusual approach to the timeline of the story.

“Just Remembering” is screening at Nippon Connection

Teruo is a former dancer who suffers from an injury on his leg that has forbidden him from dancing, and now works as a light technician for a theater company, although he is not exactly great at his job. Yo is a taxi driver (concluding the role reversal element), and a fan of Winona Ryder’s segment in the aforementioned movie, and also Teruo’s former girlfriend. Through a series of flashbacks mostly taking place around July 26, Teruo’s birthday, their backstory is revealed, as much as the background of a middle-aged man always sitting on a bench...

Part of a project for students at the Kyoto University of Arts, produced by Kaizo Hayashi, Keita Fujimoto’s debut feature offers a different perspective on the concepts of disability and caretaking, through an approach that is both romantic and realistically pointy.

“Just the Two of Us” is screening at Nippon Connection

Set in Kyoto’s Nishijin district, the film revolves around Shunsaku, a man who has been bedridden since a terrible accident took place, leaving him with only his father, elderly Gohei, to take care of him. Gohei has repeatedly tried to bring in caretakers, but Shunsaku’s reaction is always to utter the most obscene things to those women who apply for their job, essentially chasing them away with his words. Gohei eventually discusses his problem in a radio show, which is where Hanae, a blind but very beautiful young woman, hears of it and decides to take up the job,...

The family drama genre quite frequently takes an extreme, perverse hypostasis in Japanese cinema, with the harsh realism actually being one of the trademarks of local titles. Actor/Filmmaker Hideo Sasaki stumbled upon such a script 10 years ago, written by Takehiko Minato, eventually managing to shoot a movie out of it when he met Aimi Satsukawa, who embodies the protagonist in the best fashion. The result was “Confession”.

The story starts in the present, in a house deep in the mountains, where Mizuki, a 32-year-old woman is living peacefully, almost in complete silence, with her older, potter husband. The serenity is broken, however, when her stepbrother Iori shows up along with his girlfriend, after 15 years of absence, to inform her that their mother has died. Both his and his girlfriend’s attitude is somewhat contentious, and through a series of flashbacks, we soon learn why.

The movie then takes a leap backwards,...

Fresh from his Netflix success with “Ride or Die”, a film that everyone seems to have seen for different reasons, Ryuichi Hiroki continues his exploration of the concept of crime and punishment in a completely different setting, the closed community of a small fictional island.

“Noise” is screening at Udine Far East Film Festival

The story is adapted from the homonymous manga by Tetsuya Tsutsui and begins with a middle-aged local driving a stranger around the island, before the latter strangles him for no apparent reason. A bit later, the stranger ends up in the property of Keita Izumi, the “star of the island”, since his black figs are about to feature on a TV program that also comes with a big government grant that will help the declining economy of the area. The first interaction ends up without any happenings, but soon Keita’s daughter disappears. The aggravated father...

Japanese actor Joe Odagiri has made his directorial debut with They Say Nothing Stays the Same, a drama that premiered at the Venice Film Festival back in 2019 followed by a subsequent release in its native country. Now finally receiving a U.S. release courtesy of Film Movement on November 12, we’re pleased to debut the exclusive new trailer for the film shot by the great Christopher Doyle, longtime collaborator of Wong Kar-wai.

The drama follows an old ferryman in a remote Meiji-era community. His life is a peaceful, cyclical existence, given meaning by the essential role he plays in transporting people, livestock, and goods across the water, connecting villages and lives. When news arrives that a bridge is being built, it’s clear that his services will no longer be needed. Meanwhile, his life will be equally transformed by the appearance of a mysterious young woman whom he saves from drowning.

Thanks to the role of the live narrator, known in Japanese as benshi, the movies in the country were never completely silent. Vital for the film industry in its first decades, some of the benshi were similar to that of the current-day voice-over – equally telling the audience what is happening on the screen and why. Masayuki Suo’s latest comedy “Talking the Pictures” is a tribute to precisely this largely lost art form.

“Talking the Pictures” is screening at Toronto Japanese Film Festival

Like many of his friends from rural Japan in the early twentieth century, Shuntaro is crazy about movies and wants to work in them, and more precisely, he wants to be a benshi, a film narrator who gives meaning to and makes the moving pictures on screen come to life. One day, while being chased by an angry policeman, he meets Umeko and the two sneak into...

This year’s online version of the Nippon Connection presented the new film by Kaizo Hayashi. “Bolt” deals with the Fukushima disaster using an experimental cinematic concept. Divided into three episodes, it offers three unequal parts in form and content.

Bolt is screening at Nippon Connection

The setting of the first part is in one of the reactors of the nuclear plant. A group of five workers and engineers have the task to tighten a bolt causing the leak. The instructions are clear; no one should expose himself more than one minute to the scene. A longer exposition will be life-threatening. But if the bolt is not fixed, the reactor could explode. This is why one of the engineers overdoes it, still finally not being able to solve the problem. Then, as we all know, the explosion eventually occurred.

The second and third episodes follow solely this former engineer. He...

Tatsuya Ono (Masatoshi Nagase) is the free spirited oldest of three brothers. After spending 25 years in New York pursuing his dreams as a photographer he is suddenly told his brother Akihito (Joe Odagiri) has died. Although Tatsuya’s younger brother (Nobuaki Kaneko) has yet to accept the reality of the situation, Tatsuya attempts to make sense of the situation by piecing together the feelings and thoughts of his family and those around them.

Transferring Yoko Ogawa’s “Hotel Iris” to cinema is not exactly an easy task, since the combination of sadomasochistic love and mystery is presented through a rather minimalist prism, which thrives mostly due to its atmosphere than the individual episodes. However, it is with great pleasure that I say that Hiroshi Okuhara has done a splendid job.

Hotel Iris is screening at Osaka Asian Film Festival

Hotel Iris is placed in a somewhat decrepit Taiwanese coast, which tourists and locals seem to share with a number of prostitutes. The hotel is run by a woman in her 50’s who seems set on appearing much younger than she actually is, a tendency that extends to the way she dresses and makes up her face, and the way she conducts herself along younger men. At the same time, she has a rather passive-aggressive relationship with her lonely, half-Taiwanese daughter Mari, which is...

Edmund Yeo was born in Singapore in 1984, and graduated from Waseda University. His short films “Kingyo” premiered at the Venice Film Festival 2009; “Inhalation” won the Sonje Award at the Busan International Film Festival in 2010. His debut feature “River of Exploding Durians” premiered in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival 2014. In 2017, he returned to Tokyo with two films, “Yasmin-san” and “AQÉRAT” (We the Dead), with latter earning him the Best Director Award. “Malu” is his latest film.

On the occasion of “Malu” screening at Tokyo International Film Festival, we talk with him about the story that takes place in both Malaysia and Japan, the cinematography and the editing, working with Masatoshi Nagashe and Sherlyn Seo, and other topics.

The story you present in “Malu” is very interesting. What was the inspiration behind it and why did you choose to have it unfold in both Malaysia and Japan?

The inspiration behind...

Being born in Singapore, growing up in Malaysia and being based in Japan, Edmund Yeo‘s films always had a pan-Asian perspective, and “Malu”, a Japan-Malaysia co production, seems to cement this approach through a narrative that shares many elements with Naomi Kawase‘s style.

Malu is screening at Tokyo International Film Festival

The story, which unfolds in non-linear fashion, revolves around two sisters, Hong and Lan, who live with their mother in a small fishing village in Malaysia. Their mother, however, is completely unstable and has suicidal tendencies, a mentality that puts much strain to the two girls, and particularly Hong, who, as the older, is also charged with taking care of Lan. One day, their alienated grandmother kidnaps Hong, and actually raises her by herself, with the two girls not meeting for 20 years, until their mother’s death brings them together for one day. A number of flashbacks...

The refined playbook of Japanese family drama allocates a close-meshed set of rules that many directors go by. At first sight, Hitoshi Yazaki’s “Sakura” is just another chapter. Based on a popular novel, teenage drama in a high school setting, food scenes at the dinner table, and a dog that the film is named after. But the renowned director, who started as Sogo Ishii’s assistant, lays out a false trail.

“Sakura” is screening on Japannual Film Festival

Hajime (Ryo Yoshizawa), Kaoru (Takumi Kitamura), and Miki (Nana Komatsu) live a happy life together with their parents at home. Hajime is the oldest good-looking baseball star of the family. He is the contrast to Kaoru, who has good grates but no luck with girls. Miki is the youngest sister, who mistrusts all the girls that the boys bring home. Sakura is the name of the family dog. Everything seems fine...

Living in a small remote town, Akira takes one various job and roles within his community including postman and tattoo artist. One of his more eccentric clients is the poet Penguin, who receives adoring letters from fans every day. However, when one fan, Star, claims her love and intent to marry, the three of them enter an odd relationship that feeds from their eccentrics.

Fancy is screening at Camera Japan

Director Masaoki Hirota’s debut film “Fancy” is a bumpy ride, one which leads on a strong note but begins to waiver in quality as the production progresses. Starting off on the most positive aspect, Hirota crafts some deeply engaging characters with personas that help drive both comedy and conflict without feeling overly forced. This is most notable in Akira, who navigates the absurdness of the town he lives in with a calm and collective manner that heightens the comedic tone in the film.

The original is a novel of the same name by the Naoki Prize writer, Kanako Nishi, who has surpassed 550,000 copies in total. One dog named Sakura and a family of five appear. And the people who are important to them.

Under the direction of Hitoshi Yazaki, the Hasegawa family’s brothers and sisters are Takumi Kitamura, Nana Komatsu, and Ryo Yoshizawa, who are popular actors. Shinobu Terashima played the three mothers and Masatoshi Nagase played the father, and the female characters that they met were Yui Kobayashi (Keyakizaka46), Kaho Mizutani, and Kazumi Yamatani.

World-renowned pianist Adam George is in charge of the songs in the play, and the theme song “Blue ID” written by the Tokyo Incident that “reproduced” this year decorates the ending.

Synopsis:

There is a happy family that consists of parents and their 3 children: Hajime (Ryo Yoshizawa), Kaoru (Takumi Kitamura) and Miki (Nana Komatsu). Hajime is the...

The Japan Foundation Asia Center and Tokyo International Film Festival have uploaded the first of their omnibus film series, “Asian Three-Fold Mirror 2016: Reflections.” This film is in and of itself a compilation of three shorts; industry veterans Brillante Ma Mendoza, Isao Yukisada, and Sotho Kulikar illustrate three tales interrelating Japan to the Philippines, Malaysia, and Cambodia. While their plotlines are disconnected, their political arguments are not. Loosely tied to the theme “Living Together in Asia,” the three films wrest tongue-in-cheek responses to the inherently uneasy power dynamics between wealthy Japan and poorer parts of Southeast Asia. The collection peels back long-standing issues of poverty, servitude, and cross-cultural romance, bringing forth the lingering traces of Japanese (neo)imperialism.

The first and last shorts sing their songs of heartbreak and betrayal the most. The first, Brillante Ma Mendoza’s “Shiniuma Dead Horse,” follows the bleary-eyed amputee Marcial (Lou Veloso), an undocumented...

Shih Chun-han is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. His 2013 short “Including Her Out” won the Grand Prize at the Golden Harvest Awards. “RPG” is his latest film.

On the occasion of “RPG” screening at Osaka Asian Film Festival, we speak with him about the connection between Mmorpg and life, family relations, Masatoshi Nagase and the Japanese film industry

What was the inspiration behind the film? In general, what is your opinion about the penetration of Mmorpg and the digital technology in everyday life?

Five years ago, I saw somebody sticking the model of Minecraft on a real street, and the scene, which shows virtual reality, had a deep impact on me. A few weeks later, I went to buy a PS4, I was becoming a gamer. For me, the most interesting part is not separating ourselves from reality, but the ambiguous combination between virtuality and reality.

I still think games...

There have been a number of films mentioning or even focusing on the consequences of Mmorpg games have on their players, and particularly the danger of abandoning real life for the sake of the digital world. Shih Chun-han takes the concept a step further, by presenting a world where RPG games have become a “legitimate” part of society.

“RPG” is screening at Osaka Asian Film Festival

The story takes place in the near future when an Ar system named “Nirvana” has reached such a penetration point, that actually dictates everyday life, with people wearing Vr glasses in order to be able to participate in the various games and activities constantly. Sonya is a doctor who plays a game where she hunts a mythical creature known as Sawalong with her daughter and son, mostly in an effort to connect with them. The kids, however, seem to have some issues, also resulting...

Kai Sayaka attended Joshibi University of Art and Design and worked as an art creator before she started working as assistant at independent films. She directed several short films that where screened at national and international film festivals. “Ondine’s Curse”, which was awarded at Skip City International D-Cinema Festival, was shown, and was met with acclaim at a screening at Paris’s Maison de la Culture du Japon, leading to “Red Snow“, her feature debut.

We speak with her about her inspiration for the film, the impressive visuals, the concept of memory, the atmosphere, and other topics.

What was the inspiration behind “Red Snow”?

I wanted to draw humans and to focus on memory. I started by exploring my own memories and some unforgettable realities, I unraveled each and every one of the shocking events where my memories, especially of my relatives, were lost. And I thought that memory is really ambiguous,...

While mainland China’s Golden Rooster Awards crowed on social media about the star power of its attendees, the more modest Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan had to make do this year with a red carpet full of relative unknowns and sponsors that had fled the coop. Inside the auditorium in Taipei, however, the Golden Horse prizewinners and others in attendance were able to say things that those at the Golden Roosters would never have dared.

The contrast between the competing awards events offered a case study of the complex price of artistic freedom in the world of Chinese film and politics. Indeed, the two events clashed on Saturday evening in the first place because of a pro-Taiwanese independence acceptance speech at the Golden Horses last year. That prompted Beijing to ban mainland industry players from attending this year’s ceremony in Taiwan and to turn its own biennial Golden...

Set for release on February 7, 2020, a trailer for the production was previously made available and can be viewed below.

Synopsis

Set in a spa town, Akira Takasu (Masatoshi Nagase) is a carver and a mailman. He keeps in touch with poet Penguin (Masataka Kubota). Penguin has a female fan with the name of Moonlit Night’s Star (Sakurako Konishi). She sends letters to Penguin. One day, the female fan appears in front of Akira Takasu and Penguin. These three somehow get involved in a battle between the yakuza. (AsianWiki)...

It’s not often one finds a period film born of reverent, deeply researched cinephilia that is also a rip-roaring slapstick comedy suitable for the whole family, but the utterly adorable “Talking the Pictures” fits just that double bill. Directed with supremely good-natured verve by Suo Masayuki, who worked a similarly lovable if slightly more grown-up groove in 1996 with international hit “Shall We Dance?,” it’s a loopy caper inspired by, of all arcane things, the Japanese tradition of benshi — live narrators of silent films who became regional celebrities in their own right. As colorfully designed and meticulously costumed a re-creation of early-20th-century, small-town Japan as you will find in any more grandiose genre, it’s equally.

Umeko and Shuntaro meet first as mischievous children — Umeko the lonely, cute-as-a-button daughter of an itinerant prostitute and Shuntaro a rambunctious local scamp staying just out of the grasp of his mustachioed police officer nemesis.

If someone would mention Sayaka Kai in a conversation about Japanese cinema, most people would not know who you’re talking about. This would not be so surprising as Kai’s oeuvre, up until date only consisted of short-films. For those who surprisingly have heard about her will know her because of the acclaim the short-films (“Border Line” (2001), “Pellet” (2000)) she co-directed and her short movie “Odine’s curse” received.

When Kodachi (Arata Iura), a reporter, arrives in a small town, he has no other goal than to uncover the truth about the unsolved disappearance of Takumi thirty years ago. Kodachi suspects that Sayuri Eto (Nahana), the daughter of the prime suspect Sanae (Yui Natsukawa), must know more. But, just like her mother 30 years ago, she has no wish to cooperate. In his search for the truth, Kodachi also meets Kazuki Shirakawa (Masatoshi Nagase), the older brother of the disappeared Takumi.

By Shikhar Verma

Unlike what the title suggests, Japanese cult filmmaker Sabu’s “Happiness” is probably the saddest film of the year. A non-resilient, sadistic and often heart-wrenching film about memories and their truly uplifting and destructive nature.

“Happiness” screened at the New York Asian Film Festival 2017

It’s a known fact that happy moments and sad moments both have a hammering effect on our lives. They both play essential roles in breaking the monotony. While the happy moments give us joy, the sad ones give us suffering. Sabu’s film mixes some jarring narrative drifts (quite common for a Japanese film) to essentially showcase that the happy and sad memories are not far apart. They all function in the same linear limbo where life can send you either way.

The film opens with Kanzaki (Masatoshi Nagase), a well-mannered, middle-aged gentleman who arrives in an isolated town. Carrying a ‘happiness helmet’ along,...

Leading Japanese auteur director, Naomi Kawase has begun production on her latest film, “Asa ga Kuru” (translation: Comes Morning). It is based on a 2015 novel by Mizuki Tsujimura about a woman who adopts a child, but is contacted by its birth mother out of the blue.

Principal photography began on April 16 at six locations around Japan, including the Tokyo Bay area, Yokohama, Hiroshima and Kawase’s native Nara Prefecture. But the cast will only be revealed at a later date.

Shooting is scheduled to wrap in early June. The film is set for a 2020 release.

“The talent of Mizuki Tsujimura, who created the world of ‘Asa ga Kuru,’ makes me jealous,” said Kawase in a statement. “I’m overjoyed that I can turn this story into a film.” Tsujimura’s fiction has been the source of several films and drama series, including an eight-episode series based on “Asa ga Kuru...