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The question of who will continue the legacy of the 4Ks and particularly their successes on the international movie scene is one of the most dominant in the discussions among critics and scholars of Japanese cinema. Following the 2016 Un Certain Regard Jury Prize for “Harmonium”, one of the names that provides an answer to the aforementioned question is that of Koji Fukada. In the following text, we will take a closer and more thorough look at all the elements that make the 1980 born filmmaker a worthy successor of the aforementioned masters, starting from the very beginning of his life.

Born in Tokyo in Tokyo on January 5, 1980, Koji Fukada had a father who was a film buff, which resulted in him growing up in an environment surrounded with hundreds of VHS tapes, and subsequently, to become a cineaste, just like his old man. He watched the movies that inspired him to...

For a world grown weary of familiar superheroes, fear not! A new hero is on the way — and he’s made out of poop.

The Excreman — On the Road is the working title of a new production from Hong Kong’s Bliss Concepts, the company that produced the massive McDull franchise in the early 2000s, and it’s been among the most talked about productions at this year’s Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum (Haf) program.

“It’s a story about life in the sewer, and how the creatures there are fighting to survive,” says producer and Bliss Concepts general manager Samuel Choy. “They create an Exreman hero to save them but when he becomes human he discovers life among the humans is the same as it was in the sewers.”

My Life as McDull was a huge hit in Hong Kong and across Asia in 2001, winning awards at home...

A first trailer has been unveiled for Nicole Midori Woodford’s feature debut “Last Shadow at First Light,” which world premieres at the New Directors strand of the San Sebastian Film Festival.

The film is in competition for the New Directors Award. Starring acclaimed Japanese actor Nagase Masatoshi (“Sweet Bean”) and newcomer Shirata Mihaya, the film follows a teenage girl (Shirata) with a special ability to communicate with the spiritual world as she goes on a road trip from Singapore to Japan. On arrival, she is chaperoned by a cynical uncle (Nagase) to uncover the mystery of her strange dreams and her mother’s disappearance years ago. Tsutsui Mariko, Peter Yu (“A Land Imagined”) feature in supporting roles.

The feature is presented by Jeremy Chua’s Potocol (Singapore), Shozo Ichiyama’s Fourier Films (Japan), Studio Virc (Slovenia) and Happy Infinite Productions (Philippines), executive produced by Jermyn Wong and Sally Ng...

by Cláudio Alves

Under the right circumstances, a whisper can sound like a shout, soft caresses like barb-wire across the skin. In Kôji Fukada's cinema, a directorial style full of quiet oddities becomes the perfect context for such paradoxes to thrive ferociously. They never resolve themselves completely either, a sense of mystery prevailing until the end credits roll, whether it's the perversions of Harmonium or A Girl Missing's puzzle box plot. For his latest film, now in limited release, the Japanese auteur let go of those previous projects' violent spirits, redirecting his attention to a premise that sounds like easy-digestible melodrama. But, of course, that's not what Fukada has in store for his audience

Love Life was reportedly inspired by a romantic tune, but its final song rings barren, no rose-colored loveliness muffling the agony hiding between the notes. The sound produced is no crooning chant but a shattering,...

The opening stretch of Fukada Kôji’s Love Life is rich in textures that put the characters’ present-day lives into nuanced context. When we first meet Taeko (Kimura Fumino), she’s playing a game of Othello—a modern version of Reversi—against Keita (Shimada Tetsuta), her young son from a prior marriage. They live with her current husband, Jiro (Nagayama Kento), in an apartment furnished by his parents and currently decorated to celebrate Keita’s win in an Othello tournament. When Taeko steps out to the balcony, she calls out to some of her friends, who are rehearsing a routine to hold up congratulatory signage. Then she drops by the soup kitchen where she works, and on her day off, after being called in to defuse a situation.

The significance behind some of those details and how it slowly comes into focus is one of Fukada’s signatures. Several scenes...

Projects by Rima Das and Emma Kawawada also among 30 titles set to be pitched.

South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival (Biff) has unveiled the 30 titles selected for the 2023 Asian Project Market (Apm), including new works by Makbul Mubarak, Koji Fukada, Rima Das and Emma Kawawada.

The film financing event, which runs as part of Biff’s Asian Contents and Film Market, will take place from October 7-10 and comprises projects by directors who have made at least one short or full-length feature as well as producers who have been involved with at least one feature. They will conduct four...

Busan International Film Festival has announced the 30 projects selected for this year’s Asian Project Market (Apm), including new works from leading Asian filmmakers such as Japan’s Koji Fukada, Indonesia’s Makbul Mubarak and India’s Rima Das.

Fukada, whose previous films have premiered at Cannes and Venice (Love Life), will present Japan-France co-production Nagi Notes, produced by Osanai Terutaro.

Mubarak, whose Autobiography premiered at last year’s Venice before embarking on an awards haul across Asia, is bringing Watch It Burn, produced by Indonesia’s Yulia Evina Bhara, one of the producers on this year’s Cannes Critics Week winner Tiger Stripes.

Das is a Busan regular who has also had films play in Toronto and Berlin (Bulbul Can Sing). She will present Malti My Love, which the self-taught filmmaker will also produce, just as she has produced, written,...

Emerging as one of the most accomplished Japanese directors of the last decade, Harmonium and A Girl Missing director Kōji Fukada is back with his next feature. Love Life, which premiered at Venice Film Festival last fall, follows a couple living with their young son, when a tragic accident brings the boy’s long-lost father back into their life. Ahead of an August 11 release beginning at IFC Center, the first U.S. trailer has now arrived from Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Rory O’Connor said in his Venice review, “Love Life is one of those films that really wears its screenplay. The plot follows a mother’s attempts to come to terms with the death of a child, but it’s more about unusual paths the journey takes for her to get there. The director is Kôji Fukada, a filmmaker who studied under Kiyoshi Kurosawa and cites Rohmer as a key influence. The...

The film played in Competition at Venice before heading to TIFF and Lff.

BFI Distribution has acquired UK-Ireland distribution rights to Koji Fukada’s Love Life.

The film premiered in Competition at Venice Film Festival in September 2022, going on to play festivals including Toronto and BFI London Film Festival.

BFI Distribution acquired the film from mk2 Films, and has set a release date of September 15, 2023. The film will play concurrently with the BFI’s Yasujiro Ozu season, from September 1 to October 3.

Inspired by a song of the same name by Japanese singer Akiko Yano, Love Life tells the story of...

Young and talented director Kwon Man-ki's graduation project from the Korean Academy of Film Arts (Kafa) is a work of shocking maturity and pathos. “Clean Up” – also written by him – is his debut feature after few short movies and has already won 2 top prizes (New Current Award and Kth Award) at the prestigious Busan International Film Festival (Biff) and the Best Film Award at the International Film Festival and Awards of Macao. And my guess is that this is just the beginning …

“Clean Up” is available from Echelon Studios

Jung-ju (Yoon Ji-hye) has learned to disguise herself everyday behind a clean, respectable façade. She works diligently in a cleaning company during the day, she is a fervent catholic churchgoer and she washes dishes in a small restaurant at night. She is kind, hard working and polite, never angry, never loud so that nobody can see the vast ocean of pain nested inside hear heart.

Even the most solidly founded of marriages can be strained and shattered by the death of a child. For handsome, wholesome Japanese couple Taeko and Jiro, however, that tragedy shows up all the fault lines that were already in their young relationship, and that’s before living ghosts of the past show up for both partners. Koji Fukada’s “Love Life” unabashedly embraces melodramatic contrivance in its examination of modern middle-class love tested as much by social prejudices as by personal demons; it just does so with such pallid, polite reserve that its sentimentality never becomes transcendently moving. As such, this agreeable but overlong pic finds the Japanese writer-director still struggling to regain the form of his jolting 2016 Cannes prizewinner “Harmonium.”

That film was an exercise in disorienting tonal contrast and conflict, with a vein of blood-dark comedy running through severely tragic events. “Love Life,” on the other hand, is an earnest,...

MK2 Films has scored key territory deals on Japanese director Koji Fukada’s “Love Life,” which makes its world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival.

Set in contemporary Japan, “Love Life” is a character-driven film revolving around Taeko and her husband, Jiro, who are living a peaceful existence with her young son, Keita. When a tragic accident brings the boy’s long-lost father, Park, back into her life, Taeko throws herself into helping this deaf and homeless man to cope with the pain and guilt. Popular Japanese actress Fumino Kimura (“The Fable: The Killer Who Doesn’t Kill”) headlines the film.

MK2 Films has now sold the movie to Teodora (Italy), Imagine (Benelux), Leopardo (Portugal), Demiurg (Ex Yugoslavia), New Cinema (Israel), Swallow Wings (Taiwan), Edko (Hong Kong), Impact Films (India) and Encore Inflight (Airlines).

Fukada’s credits include the 2016 movie “Harmonium,” which won the jury prize at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard,...

The titles of Fukada Koji’s films almost drip with bitter irony. “Sayonara” seemed to be a farewell to human actors. Instead of being harmonious, Cannes Un Certain Regard jury prize-winner “Harmonium” was pitch black and steeped in quiet violence.

Fukada’s latest, Venice Film Festival competition title carries the moniker “Love Life.” But its subject matter is loneliness.

The story starts out on familiar lines, involving a married couple where suddenly the ex-husband of the wife appears, potentially setting up the melodrama of a triangular relationship. But in Fukada’s hands things are colder and more painful. The newcomer is burdensome, deaf and homeless. His arrival triggers, not love, but fragmentation, individualism and loneliness.

“We come into life alone and we die alone. Along the way, we try to forget about this loneliness by having families, taking lovers or sometimes even having religion. But loneliness is at the core of humanity,...

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Six years after his 2016 film Harmonium won Cannes’ jury prize in the Un Certain Regard section, Japanese director Koji Fukada is taking the big step up into Venice’s main competition with the emotionally intense family drama Love Life.

Fukada’s rise to the top tier of the international festival circuit has been telegraphed for some time. His breakthrough family comedy Hospitalité won best picture in the Japanese cinema category of the 2010 Tokyo International Film Festival, and in 2020 that same event featured him as its director in focus with a mini-retrospective. Effectively, the Tokyo festival’s organizers were arguing that Fukada was worthy of the type of top-level industry attention that Venice has now bestowed upon him.

Fukada’s ninth feature, Love Life tells a taut domestic drama about a newly married Japanese couple (Fumino Kimura and Kento Nagayama) enjoying a peaceful existence...

Click here to read the full article.

For the 79th Venice Film Festival, artistic director Alberto Barbera has put together one of the most well-curated lineups of his career. Both studios and streamers are well represented.

Netflix scored an opening-night coup with Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, with buzz promising that it’ll wow the Lido, alongside Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe biopic, Blonde, with Ana de Armas; Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Mexican epic Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths; and Romain Gavras’ French action thriller Athena.

Studio fare is well represented by Warner Bros.’ Don’t Worry Darling from director Olivia Wilde; Focus has Todd Field’s Tár with Cate Blanchett and Mark Strong; MGM will debut Luca Guadagnino’s Timothée Chalamet-Taylor Russell starrer Bones and All; Searchlight presents The Banshees of Inisherin from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri director Martin McDonagh; and Sony Pictures Classics will be...

Production has wrapped in both Singapore and Japan on Nicole Midori Woodford’s supernatural art house drama “Last Shadow at First Light.” It stars Nagase Masatoshi, Tsutsui Mariko, Peter Yu (“A Land Imagined”) and newcomer Shirata Mihaya.

The story examines the intangible nature of trauma and the ripples of its aftermath through 16-year-old Ami (Shirata) who is haunted by visions.

“This is a film borne out of darkness and loss, of a family’s frailties, set in both Singapore and Japan. Shooting between two countries, I hope to capture the diverse mise-en-scene from the urban cities to the vast transformed landscapes my characters are lost within. It has been incredible to work with my actors amidst such poignant terrain.”

A large part of the filming took place in and around the city of Rikuzentakata in Japan, an area significantly affected by the tsunami and nuclear disaster of 2011.

Upon the discovery...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Fabian: Going to the Dogs (Dominik Graf)

In the first hour of Dominik Graf’s Fabian: Going to the Dogs, we see the title character running around 1920s Berlin, bumping into eccentric characters at bars and nightclubs while the camera moves and cuts at a whirlwind pace. It’s a time of indulgence and recklessness for Fabian and other young people in Germany, and then he finds himself standing face to face with a young woman in the back of a club. The camera cuts to a rapid-fire montage of both characters together and in love, scenes from later in the film we haven’t gotten to yet. Up to this point, Fabian was living in the present; without warning he begins to see a future,...

“Au Revoir l’Été” by Kôji Fukada is a little gem of a movie, simple and yet multilayered and visually enchanting. It is a story of transition to adulthood, the Japanese title “Hotori no Sakuko” can be translated “Sakuko on the edge” and this is exactly it.

“Au Revoir l’Été” is screening at Vesoul International Film Festival of Asian Cinema

Sakuko (Fumi Nakaido) is a 18 year old student who has just failed the University entrance exam and is going for a short holiday to a small seaside resort with her aunt Mikie (Mayu Tsuruta). They are both looking to get some quiet and constructive time out of this holiday; Sakuko needs to study and prepare for her next session of exams and Mikie is working on a translation. At the resort, we get to know Ukichi, Mikie’s ex lover, who runs a hotel in town, his student daughter...

Love Life

Just a couple of weeks back we saw Japan’s Koji Fukada name attached to a market project going by the title of Love on Trial. Is this project and Love Life one of the same? After a 2020 that saw the helmer work in the short form with a three film output, production on Love Life (inspired by a song by Japanese artist Akiko Yano and the consequences of the pandemic) would have began in September of 2021 with some French production money. We know Fukada best from a string of popular film fest items in Sayonara (2015), Harmonium (2016), The Man from the Sea (2018), A Girl Missing (read the review) and finally The Real Thing (2020).…...

Soon after completing his sprawling adaptation of an early 2000s manga by Hoshisato Mochiru, writer-director Fukada Kōji openly began to lament that Japanese cinema “is going to go down the drain” if it continues to mine graphic novels and other pre-existing intellectual property instead of pursuing original ideas. Needless to say, the timing of his criticism made Fukada seem like something of a flawed messenger for the cause, even if he was also arguing for a broader national investment in the culture and venues of arthouse cinema at the same time.

After watching all 232 minutes of “The Real Thing,” however, it’s easy to appreciate why the 41-year-old “Harmonium” filmmaker gave himself a get out of jail free card: This befuddled anti-romance, about a cautious salaryman whose life unravels after he saves a reckless woman from getting hit by a train, may have its roots in a popular comic book...

With the summer movie season underway, Cannes now on the horizon, and Tribeca kicking off this month, the film industry turns its gears again after an unprecedented near-dormancy. This month’s lineup of new releases is an eclectic mix of bold horror, mysterious romances, riveting documentaries, and much more.

15. Werewolves Within (Josh Ruben)

After making a delightful impression on Veep and I Think You Should Leave, Sam Richardson is becoming a leading man with the horror-comedy Werewolves Within, which comes from Scare Me director Josh Ruben. Also starring Milana Vayntrub, Harvey Guillén, Cheyenne Jackson, Michaela Watkins, and Michael Chernus, the film follows a small community that becomes trapped by a snowstorm and newly arrived forest ranger Finn (Richardson) and postal worker Cecily (Vayntrub) must uncover the truth behind a mysterious creature.

Where to Watch: Theaters (June 25) and VOD (July 2)

14. Sweat (Magnus von Horn)

A Cannes Film Festival selection last year,...

After landing on our radars with the carefully observed family drama Harmonium, Koji Fukada’s A Girl Missing received a U.S. release from Film Movement last summer and now the distributor has picked up the Japanese auteur’s latest project, the whopping 232-minute drama The Real Thing. Ahead of a June 4 release for the Cannes 2020 selection, we’re pleased to debut the new trailer. While it’ll arrive in Virtual Cinemas and VOD, if you’re in Los Angeles, the 237-minute television version will have its theatrical premiere on June 4-6 at Acropolis Cinema.

An adaptation of Mochiru Hoshisato’s manga, the film follows a floundering toy salesman who rescues a beguiling woman whose car was stuck on the train tracks. She then inadvertently whisks him into an epic series of misadventures that turn his life upside down. While his once humdrum routine was already complicated by two female co-workers,...

A seemingly regular family gets an unexpected visitor

The Suzuokas are a seemingly regular family of three, living in the suburbs. The husband, Toshio, runs a small metalworking industry in the basement of the house they live in. His wife, Fumie is a homemaker and their little daughter, Hotaru goes to the elementary school and takes harmonium lessons.

However, when Kusataro Yasaka, an old acquaintance of Kanji arrives unexpectedly to their house, after he is released from prison, everything changes. Kanji seems to have a past life that Mariko did not know of, and a secret he shares with Kusataro that makes him invite him to stay at their house. Mariko is infuriated in the beginning, but as time passes and Kusataro reveals the reasons he went to prison, he takes a liking to him. The same applies to Hotaru, as Kusataro also knows how to play the harmonium and begins teaching her.

The concept of the home invasion has been explored in a number of radically different films in Japanese cinema, from Takashi Miike’s “Visitor Q” to Koji Fukada’s “Harmonium”. Naoya Fujita adds another, radically different approach, by making the invader a public servant, in an effort that netted him the Best Picture Award from Skip City International D-Cinema Festival.

Stay screened at Skip City International D-Cinema Festival

A group of five people has occupied a traditional Japanese house, living there in a kind of commune where the only rule is that they accept everybody and that they all do their share in chores and contribute financially. However, the local town office wants them out of there, even though they have no particular reason to evict them, and has dispatched a number of public servants to ask them to leave, to no avail. The latest “agent” is Yajima, a young...

New section introduced in response to Covid-19 travel restrictions will screen 32 films of which 25 are world premieres.

Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) has announced the full line-up for its 33rd edition, including the 32 titles selected for its Tokyo Premiere section, introduced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and international travel restrictions.

Unlike many major festivals this year, TIFF will be going forward with in-person screenings at its usual venues, but has replaced three of its major sections – Competition, Asian Future and Japanese Cinema Splash – with the new Tokyo Premiere section.

The section, which includes 25 world premieres, “has a large focus on supporting young filmmakers,...

The Busan film festival’s Asian project market will be held online this year on Oct. 12-14. Some 22 projects from around Asia will vie for production funds during the market.

These include “Love Life,” from Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada who won the Un Certain Regard jury prize at Cannes in 2016 for “Harmonium,” and “A Burning Question” from Bangladesh’s Mostofa Sarwar Farooki, who closed Busan in 2012 with “Television.”

Other selections include “Tick It” from Vietnamese director Tran Thanh Huy, who won Busan’s New Currents award in 2019 winner for “Rom,” and “A River in the Mirror,” by Tashi Gyeltshen, Fipresci International Critics’ Award 2018 winner for “The Red Phallus.”

From the Philippines, Sheron Dayoc, winner of Busan’s Mecenat Award in 2016 with “The Crescent Rising,” will participate in the market with “6th Finger.” From Kazakhstan, Elzat Eskendir, who won Busan’s Sonje Award in the same year for “Off-season,” will present “Abel.

New projects from Cannes label directors Wei Shujun and Koji Fukada among line-up.

The Asian Project Market, the biggest investment and co-production market in Asia, is to shift online due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The industry platform, which takes place during the Busan International Film Festival (Biff), will run as a virtual event from October 12 to 14 alongside the Asian Contents and Film Market, which previously announced it would run as a hybrid event.

This year will feature 22 projects, which is down on the 29 titles presented in both 2018 and 2019.

The selection includes Ripple Of Life by Chinese director Wei Shujun, whose...

The Tokyo International Film Festival will shine a spotlight on the work of internationally-acclaimed Japanese director Koji Fukada during its 33rd edition. The festival will be held in front of live audiences Oct. 31 – Nov. 9, 2020.

Fukada, who graduated from The Film School of Tokyo, has worked in both animation and live action film. His debut feature “Human Comedy in Tokyo,” played at the Rome and Osaka festivals. He achieved wider acclaim in 2010 with “Hospitalité,” which appeared in the Tokyo festival that year. His “Harmonium” premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2016 and claimed the Jury Prize.

Since then, Fukada has made “The Man From the Sea” (2018), followed by the Locarno International Film Festival selection “A Girl Missing” (2019). His latest film, “The Real Thing” was named to the Cannes Film Festival’s 2020 Official Selection.

“The stories depicted by Koji Fukada always reflect the real world. His films express the relationship between...

Festival will screen Fukada’s The Real Thing, selected for Cannes’ 2020 Official Selection, as well as his earlier films.

This year’s Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) will highlight the work of Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada, who has been selected as the Director in Focus in the festival’s Japan Now section.

Fukada has been gaining increasing international attention, with his 2016 Harmonium winning the Jury Prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section in 2016, and his latest film, The Real Thing, being selected for Cannes’ 2020 Official Selection.

He also recently launched the Mini Theater Aid initiative with fellow directors, including Ryusuke Hamaguchi,...

In what’s shaping up to be the strangest weekend yet since the coronavirus outbreak forced American theaters to close, the biggest release is Beyoncé’s visual album, “Black Is King,” a visionary feature-length companion to her 2019 album, in the tradition of “Lemonade.”

A number of studio movies — including Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” — had tentatively planted their flag on July 31, only to delay amid the latest spike of infections. But the strategy is changing lately, as Russell Crowe road-rage thriller “Unhinged” moves forward with its release … abroad. Now “Tenet” and other titles are weighing a similar international-first strategy.

That leaves U.S. audiences with two very different options: Buy a ticket and fly abroad to see the tentpoles you’re missing (assuming foreign nations let Americans enter the country), or make do with the virtual releases that remain. In some cases, films are still pushing for limited theatrical releases among...

A Girl Missing, the English-language title of Fukada Kôji's follow-up to 2016’s well-received Harmonium, is something of a misnomer or feint. While a girl, a teenage girl, does go missing in A Girl Missing, she reappears a week later, physically, if not emotionally or mentally, unharmed, the victim of an impromptu kidnapping by Tatsuo (Sudo Ren), the introverted nephew of Fukada’s central character, Shirakawa Ichiko (Tsutsui Mariko), giving a multi-layered, nuanced performance), a middle-aged, home-care nurse and the kidnapped girl’s occasional tutor. Less a suspense drama or mystery thriller, A Girl Missing unfolds as an oblique, elliptical character study, a complex, often contradictory exploration of the devastating consequences of Ichiko’s relationship with Tatsuo, the kidnapped girl’s family, and Ichiko’s seemingly isolated decision to keep her connection...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Black Is King (Beyoncé)

Four years ago, Beyoncé dropped the film version of Lemonade, which brought together directors Kahlil Joseph, Jonas Åkerlund, Mark Romanek, Melina Matsoukas, and more to deliver a visual album that, like many of her works, had an immense cultural impact. She is now returning with Black Is King, a film in production for an entire year that reimagines the tale of The Lion King through the perspective of the Black experience. Now available on Disney+, we imagine it’ll be the most-watched film of the weekend.

Where to Stream: Disney+

Bull (Annie Silverstein)

There’s not much to do around Kristyl’s (Amber Havard) hard...

Nothing is as it seems in A Girl Missing, the latest feature from writer and director Kôji Fukada. Mariko Tsutsui stars as Ichiko, a visiting nurse who becomes a suspect in the kidnapping of Saki (Miyu Ozawa), a young student she had been helping study for school exams. Flashbacks follow Ichiko before and after the incident as she discards her past and her fiancé for a solitary life in a new neighborhood. What happens to Saki and her older sister Motoko (Mikako Ichikawa) unfolds simultaneously through two timelines.

Tsutsui also appeared in Fukada’s Harmonium, which won Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes. Fukada has been a member of the Seinendan theater group, founded by Oriza Hirata, since 2005. Seinendan actors, as well as Hirata’s theories about “quiet drama,” have figured significantly in Fukada’s work. (His 2015 sci-fi drama Sayonara was based on a Hirata play.)

We spoke with...

"It had to come out eventually." Film Movement has debuted an official trailer for a Japanese indie drama titled A Girl Missing, the latest from acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada. This film first premiered at the Locarno and Toronto Film Festivals last year, and stopped by a number of international festivals throughout the fall. Koji Fukada's followup to the critically-acclaimed Harmonium, A Girl Missing "is a satisfying slow-burn drama expertly told." A home-care nurse's relationship with the family she has spent years working for is threatened when her nephew is arrested for kidnapping their daughter. Japanese filmmakers love to tell dramatic stories about family and interpersonal relationships with devastating twists and turns. The film stars Mariko Tsutsui, Mikako Ichikawa, and Sôsuke Ikematsu. This looks like it starts out rather slow & calm and gets extremely intense as it goes on. Here's the official US trailer (+ two posters) for Kôji Fukada's A Girl Missing,...

After gaining international acclaim with his Cannes prize-winning family drama “Harmonium,” Japanese director Kōji Fukada returned with “A Girl Missing,” reuniting with actress Mariko Tsutsui for a slow-burning mystery thriller which premiered at Locarno Film Festival last year before going on to play at the Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival. And now, the film’s (virtual) release approaches this Friday July 31st.

Read More: ‘Martin Margiela: In His Own Words’ Trailer: The Elusive Fashion Genius Tells His Story In New Doc

In “Harmonium”, Mariko played a woman whose life was destroyed by tragic circumstances beyond her control.

Continue reading ‘A Girl Missing’ Trailer: New Kōji Fukada Film Promises Slow-Burning Mystery at The Playlist.

One of the most intriguing careers to track this past decade has been that of Kōji Fukada. Gaining international acclaim with his Cannes prize-winning family drama Harmonium, the Japanese director followed it up with A Girl Missing, a slow-burn mystery thriller that premiered at Locarno Film Festival last year and went on to play at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. Now set for a release in Virtual Cinemas nationwide beginning this Friday, we’re pleased to debut the exclusive trailer courtesy of Film Movement.

The film follows two timelines, both featuring Mariko Tsutsui’s character. In one, she works as a home nurse for a family, but one of their granddaughters goes missing and someone in the family may be involved. In another timeline, she forms a relationship with a younger hairdresser. One of the film’s many pleasures lies in Fukada’s specific...

Guilt by Dissociation: Fukada Explores the Burden of Others in Exemplary Melodrama

Director Kôji Fukada presents a melodrama hung on absurdity for his fourth feature, A Girl Missing, another Dostoevskyian tale collapsing the lines between crime and punishment into a complex grey area of juxtaposing social norms and self-serving desires. Reuniting with his Harmonium (2016) lead Mariko Tsutsui, Fukada creates another emotionally palpable tale about perspective. The original Japanese title, Yokogao, means “side profile,” and as we come to learn, each angle of this unique melodrama arrives with deep-seated complexities, including that of its protagonist, an affable healthcare worker whose relationship to both the perpetrator and the victim in a crime which sparks significant media attention places her in a catch-22 situation.…...

Founded by leading arthouse film directors, Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Koji Fukada, the crowdfunding campaign has successfully raised over 3 million Usd to directly support independent movie theaters all across Japan.

On April 7th the Japanese government declared a state of emergency due to the spread of the novel coronavirus. It asked many businesses to close their doors while leaving the scale and timing of monetary compensation unclear. As a result, close to 200 small-scale independent movie theaters, also known as “mini-theaters,” across Japan are in danger of closing forever.

Throughout its 100+ years of film history, there has never been an interruption in arthouse film screenings and foreign film distribution in Japan—even after the collapse of the studio system in the middle of the 20th century. This is due to the existence of “mini-theaters,” throughout the country that have continued to focus on arthouse films. The government’s requests to refrain from...

A Girl Missing director Kôji Fukada seated in front of posters for James Crump’s Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco and Atsuko Hirayanagi’s Oh Lucy! at Film Movement Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Kôji Fukada’s A Girl Missing (Yokogao), shot by Ken'ichi Negishi (Akihiro Toda’s Neko Ni Mikan), stars Mariko Tsutsui with Mikako Ichikawa, Miyu Ogawa, Mitsuru Fukikoshi, Sôsuke Ikematsu, and Ren Sudo. Fukada’s Harmonium won the Cannes Un Certain Regard Jury Prize in 2016 and he is also the director of The Man From The Sea and Au Revoir L’Été. At Film Movement in New York I spoke with Kôji about his love of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, how some say his heroine resembles Golden Globe winner Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker in Todd Phillips’ movie, unravelling societal conventions, and what he did to create the sound design in post-production.

Motoko (Mikako Ichikawa) with Ichiko (Mariko...

How much our lives can get destroyed just by plain coincidence or the particularly bad string of coincidences? It is an ages-long philosophical question that has been treated in movies practically from the beginning. Japanese auteur Koji Fukada, however, does not take the usual path to tell this kind of story. It is not a mystery or a thriller, it is a psychological drama focused on one singular character in the midst of the turmoil. “A Girl Missing” premiered in Locarno and we caught it at Viennale.

“A Girl Missing” is screening at Viennale

The character here is Ichiko, whom we meet as Risa Uchida, a widow looking for a change in her life. She says that directly to her hairdresser Kazumichi (Ikematsu Sosuke), explaining that she chose him because of his last name he shares with her late husband. The two of them commence a friendly relationship that might turn into something more romantic,...

Mariko Tsutsui stars as home-care nurse embroiled in kidnapping aftermath.

Film Movement has snapped up North American rights to Kôji Fukada’s Tiff selection A Girl Missing ahead of its North American premiere tomorrow (9).

The acquisition bulks up the distributor’s slate of Tiff titles that includes Dian Yi’nan’s Chinese gangland noir The Wild Goose Lake, Bertrand Bonello’s horror-fantasy Zombi Child, and Hlynur Palmason’s A White, White Day.

Mariko Tsutsui plays a home-care nurse to an elderly matriarch whose relationship with the family is threatened when her nephew is arrested for the kidnapping of one of the family’s daughters.

“Does someone who’s broken a family deserve a happy future?” teenage Motoko fires at middle-aged Ichiko halfway through Koji Fukada’s A Girl Missing. The woman falters, and the question is left unanswered, hanging like a Damocles sword all throughout Fukada’s follow up to Harmonium. Much like his Cannes Un Certain Regard Jury Prize winner, A Girl Missing unspools as a revenge drama homing in on people paying a price for their kindness, a tale of family disequilibrium with Mariko Tsutsui–already seen in Harmonium–serving as a magnetic lead. But even her performance can hardly salvage a film that gets swamped in its own intricated scaffolding, a knotted tale about a woman wrestling with unresolved scars, just as hopeless to find some closure as the story to morph into a satisfying whole.

By the time Motoko (Mikako Ichikawa) throws her jibe, Tsutsui is still Ichiko. In a...

A middle-aged woman living in suburban Japan and eager to make new friends, Risa (Tsutsui Mariko), has one of those faces that makes people feel like they’ve met her before; like they’ve already learned everything there is to know about this perfect stranger before they’ve even said “hello.” It’s enough to unnerve Risa’s handsome new hairstylist (Ikematsu Sosuke), who swears that he recognizes her even as he works on changing the way she looks. Fukada Kōji’s fractured and distant new film — another of the “Harmonium” director’s pensive, slow-boiling revenge sagas about broken people who feel betrayed by their own kindness — will almost be over before the hairstylist is able to place his sexually forward new client. But it doesn’t take long for us to figure out that there’s more to Risa than meets the eye; more to her than she can even stand.

The intriguing ambiguity suffusing Kôji Fukada’s “Harmonium” returns to a certain degree in “A Girl Missing,” but this time the writer-director neglects to reinforce onscreen relationships, resulting in a disappointing and unmoving drama of how a good woman’s life is shattered by keeping quiet. Thankfully, actress Mariko Tsutsui, who played the wife in “Harmonium,” exudes an intriguing off-kilter combination of sympathy and mystery as a visiting nurse whose world is changed drastically when her nephew abducts a girl she’s been mentoring, yet unfortunately the lack of script support undercuts audience involvement far more than the parallel timelines. Fukada’s reputation on the festival circuit guarantees a certain amount of play but is unlikely to win the director new fans.

An excellent opening ramps up expectations through a gratifying combination of confident filmmaking and skilled performances, playing on the potential for intimacy between a hairdresser and a first-time client.

The 72nd Locarno Film Festival, a longtime beacon of the international indie filmmaking community, is being shaken up under new artistic director Lili Hinstin. She is the Swiss event’s second female chief since it was founded in 1946 and one of the few women to head an A-list fest.

Hinstin takes the reins from Italy’s Carlo Chatrian who went on to become Berlinale co-director after six years at Locarno’s helm, his last edition characterized by movies with women at their center. The Swiss fest will run Aug. 7-17.

In announcing her selection, Hinstin, who previously headed France’s Entrevues Belfort Intl. Film Festival, says she’s aiming to “surprise, perturb and raise questions” and points out that “the choices you make for your first festival all tend to become a kind of manifesto.”

The Locarno opener is clearly significant: “If Only,” a partly autobiographical sentimental comedy about three kids of divorced parents,...

Celebrating its 72nd edition this year, the Locarno Film Festival has been the birthplace for the finest in international arthouse cinema and this year’s lineup looks to continue the tradition. Ahead of the festival, running August 7-17, the full slate has been announced.

Top highlights include the world premieres of Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela (pictured above), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth, Ben Rivers & Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Krabi, 2562, Ben Russell’s Color-blind, Denis Côté’s Wilcox, Fabrice Du Welz’s Adoration, as well as a new 12-minute short film from Yorgos Lanthimos titled Nimic and starring Matt Dillon. Other titles that have caught out eye are Echo, from Sparrows director Rúnar Rúnarsson, and A Girl Missing, from Harmonium director Koji Fukada.

The festival will also kick off with some star power as Patrick Vollrath’s 7500, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, will premiere. Check out the lineup below,...

Italian director Ginevra Elkann’s directorial debut, “If Only,” about kids with divorced parents, will open the 72nd Locarno Film Festival, its first edition under new artistic director Lili Hinstin, who has assembled an edgy mix of promising titles from young auteurs and more established names.

“If Only” and the fest closer, iconic Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Uzbekistan-set “To the Ends of the Earth” will both premiere in Locarno’s 8,000-seat Piazza Grande.

Also set for a launch from the Piazza Grande is Amazon’s terrorist drama “7500,” directed by Patrick Vollrath, with star Joseph Gordon-Levitt in tow; Valerie Donzelli’s comedy “Notre Dame”; and fellow French director Stephane Demoustier’s “The Girl With a Bracelet,” in which a teenager stands trial for murdering her best friend.

Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which premiered in Cannes, will also screen on the Piazza (without talent in...

Ken Watanabe and Koichi Sato star in the film.

Japanese studio Kadokawa Corp is arriving in Cannes with a busy slate headed by action drama Fukushima 50, starring Ken Watanabe and Koichi Sato, and also including new titles from Takahisa Zeze, Koji Fukada and Michihito Fujii.

Directed by Setsuro Wakamatsu (The Unbroken), Fukushima 50 tells the story of the courageous group of workers who remained on site to stabilise the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant during its meltdown following the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami.

Based on Ryusho Kadota’s book On The Brink: The Inside Story of Fukushima Daiichi, the...

Young and talented director Kwon Man-ki’s graduation project from the Korean Academy of Film Arts (Kafa) is a work of shocking maturity and pathos. “Clean Up” – also written by him – is his debut feature after few short movies and has already won 2 top prizes (New Current Award and Kth Award) at the prestigious Busan International Film Festival (Biff) and the Best Film Award at the International Film Festival and Awards of Macao. And my guess is that this is just the beginning …

“Clean Up” is screening at Florence Korea Film Fest

Jung-ju (Yoon Ji-hye) has learned to disguise herself everyday behind a clean, respectable façade. She works diligently in a cleaning company during the day, she is a fervent catholic churchgoer and she washes dishes in a small restaurant at night. She is kind, hard working and polite, never angry, never loud so that nobody can see the vast...

Kanji Furutachi is best known for playing Toshio, one of the leading roles in “Harmonium”, directed by Koji Fukada, which won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.

He has also appeared in numerous plays in Japan, including the title role for the play “The Treasured Son”, which won Japan’s most prestigious drama award: The Kishida Drama Award.

His many film appearances include “Hospitalité” and “My Back Page” (for which he won the Best Supporting Actor Award from the Takasaki Film Festival and the Best New Comer Award at the Tama Cinema Forum). He studied acting with Uta Hagen, Carol Rosenfeld, and many others at Hb Studio in New York City.

Here are his ten favorite Japanese films, in no particular order

1. Tokyo Story

2. High and Low

3. Rashomon

4. Seven Samurai

5. The Yellow Handkerchief (Yoji Yamada,...