A man’s get up and go is what defines him, according to the writer Yukio Mishima. If that’s the case then Cocoa, the main protagonist of Genta Matsugami’s debut film, has a lot going for her. Super-smart and determined, she seems like a student who can be anything she wants but she faces a tough challenge in escaping the poverty of her background in a film that mixes class analysis with a coming-of-age story.
Cocoa Umeda lives in a small rural city. It feels like a slow and tranquil place where the biggest events are the seasonal festivals but for Cocoa and her friends things are getting intense as they approach their final exams and high school graduation. Cocoa could go on to higher education because she has potential but her options are limited by her financial situation.
After her mother passed away, her working-class family was reduced to an amiable but lazy father named Kazuo (Yota Kawase) who gambles and a borderline hikikomori brother named Tokio who lives the life of a layabout after failing to make a mark in Tokyo as one half of a manzai duo. In a few deft scenes in their danchi apartment we see the rotten situation the girl is in as she plays the part of provider for the trio and as charming as Yota Kawase’s laid-back performance can be, we begin to resent the men who live a couple of levels above squalor and cling to Cocoa for cooking, cleaning, and cash which she earns working at a hotdog stall in a theme park on weekends.
Cocoa can’t afford to think about higher education. She expects to continue supporting her family. To earn a little extra she makes the fateful choice to work as a video fetish performer for an amateur director named Naoki who records her destroying things with a baseball bat and her feet. However, when an aunt tells Cocoa her mother saved some money just for her to go to uni, the girl can dream again and becomes determined to escape the stifling inertia of her rural hometown by entering a national university which costs 3 million yen. She just has to reach that magical figure and she might be able to change her life…
Set-up over, the second act of the film follows Cocoa’s efforts. Aya Kitai, a fresh face on the film scene who had previously won the MissiD 2017 Fantasista Sakurada Prize, takes the lead role and imbues her character with a well of passion and defiance that tugs at the heart. Spunky and smart, a firecracker with defiance, resilience and common sense, she tackles things with gusto and the camerawork and film’s rhythm really reflect her efforts by being fluid, breezy and energetic. It stand in contrast to the quagmire of home and through seeing her work to better herself we believe in her ability to escape. Drama comes from seeing whether she can or not as elements of crime and family crisis get thrown into the narrative.
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The film is at its best when it looks at Cocoa’s climb out of poverty as we see the depth of her determination in numerous sequences of her studying, stacking 1000 yen notes from work and solving problems that affect her quality of life. This is contrasted with the easier way of life her better-off but loyal friends enjoy thanks to their parents. Extra urgency to her situation is added by betrayals she suffers at the hands of the deadbeats but we hear their tales of failure which humanise them. The most poignant is gained from Naoki, a talented youngster going to seed, who was the other half of Tokio’s manzai act and stews with regrets over chances not taken. His hard-won experience leads him to make astute observations and a direct and powerful appeal to Cocoa that anyone who has lived a working-class life will have heard: “Don’t end up like us.”
One can see how a need for money and naivete leads Cocoa to try the video fetish stuff which is attention-grabbing especially because it opens the film but it is tastefully shot as far as one can do such a thing, although it could be accused of having its cake and eating it at one point as the foot fetish angle is shown via Naoki’s viewfinder… More importantly it provides drama for later on as criminals get involved but Matsugami’s script doesn’t lean too heavily on this angle. We always have Cocoa’s social situation firmly in our sights and that is compelling itself.
Just as interestingly is how simply the film lays out possible fates for average girls in Japan. Cocoa’s friends with money will either bow to social pressures and start a family or enter whatever university their grades get them to (barring any sexism scandals blocking female applicants) but it falls on working-class Cocoa to be an agent of positive aggressive female agency as she struggles to define her own path in life and fights for her future. Which is not to say she is alone in her struggle. If you can’t choose your family, you can choose your friends and sequences in the film capture the closeness Cocoa feels to two other girls as they walk around town confidently and revel in being with each other, aware that this may be the last time they can be free and together.
The Japanese title for this indie gem is Joshi Kosei Elegy or, to translate that, High School Girl Elegy and it is fitting. The moment of graduation from high school is the start of the transition from adolescence to adulthood. It is when people begin to shed the safety in conformity and rules but Cocoa has been doing that for a while now and we believe in her abilities to survive and in that open ending when she looks directly into the camera we believe that she will achieve what she sets her mind to but just for that precious moment before graduation, she can revel in friendships and dreams.
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This review was first published on VCinema on March 03rd. It plays at Japan Cuts next month.
Born in Hiroshima in 1981, Genta Matsugami is a film director who operates the creative production-house16 bit.inc. He graduated from Osaka University of Arts in 2005 and his graduation work won a prize in the Pia Film Festival Award of that year. Demolition Girl is his debut feature. It has already distinguished itself on the festival circuit, first at its world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival in Utah in January, where lead actress Aya Kitai won an honourable mention for her performance, and then at the Osaka Asian Film Festival in March where it scooped the JAPAN CUTS award. This means it will receive a screening at the JAPAN CUTS festival in New York in July. It has easy to see how the film has impressed audiences as it presents a refreshingly honest and concise depiction of working-class life in Japan.
The story of Demolition Girl focuses on a high school student named Coco (Kitai), who seems trapped in her small-town existence because of her poor background and a family who drag her down. Despite being working-class, she aspires to go to university in Tokyo, seeing this as a way out of poverty. University is tough to enter and expensive so she needs to work hard whether by studying or dabbling in the fetish industry by making illicit “crush videos”. The audience will root for her as they see the obstacles she faces and her determination not to give up and audience engagement is hooked by a persuasive performance from Kitai in her acting debut (she had previously won the MissiD 2017 Fantasista Sakurada Prize).
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This is a film that displays class consciousness for contemporary Japan as Matsugami tells a compelling story of someone displaying determination in desperate circumstances at a time when poverty is on the rise, small business are going bankrupt faster than ever, and social mobility is flatlining. It also presents a defiant female lead, an inspiration at a time when people are under intense pressure in and outside of work.
Genta Matsugami took time out after the second screening to talk about the background of the film and the casting of actors in an interview conducted with the help of Keiko Matsushita and later transcribed by Takako Pocklington.
Jason Maher: What was your inspiration for this film?
Genta Matsugami: There are several factors. It was three years ago when I started planning this film. I have been feeling everything is not right in current-day Japan, perhaps in the entire world. Problems in Japan have become prominent especially after 3.11 (the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011). It is because grown-ups are hopeless, that’s why contemporary Japan is hopeless.
The main characters are teenagers, high school girls who are forced into a difficult situation although they shouldn’t need to take any responsibility for it.
However, there is no point just being depressed about it. We need to get over it and keep living. I wanted to make a film with a message that, “even so, we will live on”.
So why did you choose to focus on working-class characters?
There are lots of working-class people in Japan. If there is no hope for working-class people, then there is no hope for the country. I would rather depict their lives than some well-off people’s lives. People with lower incomes struggle for their lives. It is a serious problem. I thought if I avoid depicting it, I wouldn’t be able to render my message to the audience.
Would you say that the themes of the film are hope and aspiration?
I don’t want to divide grown-ups and children into structures but obviously, the grown-ups should be blamed for creating the current situation. It is not the responsibility of teenagers’ and yet they will suffer social damage. I thought if I didn’t portray it, I wouldn’t be able to portray hope itself.
Casting of the characters is very important.
Yes, it was very important, because if I made a wrong choice, I wouldn’t have been able to convey my messages fully. I took time and carefully chose the people.
How did you discover Aya Kitai and what did you see in her as an actress?
I asked many people. Then I just looked for someone by myself because my budget was tight, then luckily found her in Tokyo. The first reason I chose her is her face. It is not only that her face is beautiful but it also has a strong characteristic and I had the vision that she would make a strong impression on the screen when I first saw her.
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Her father is played by Yota Kawase. It was important for him to have a charm and gentleness to his character because the main character’s situation is so bad. How did you go about casting him?
The character, the father, is a total waste of space. If he is just a scumbag, the viewers would see him as a hateful person but I believe that even if a man is useless, the man can still be humane and somehow lovable. I think the father’s characteristic worked well for a total balance in the film. And, since Aya Kitai has no acting career and this film is her first film, I thought if some veteran actors supported her, the film would be firm and look realistic.
How did you prepare the actors for their roles?
It depends upon the person because each actor has different careers and styles. For Aya, I asked her just to try hard rather than be concerned about acting skills. Even if she tried to act technically, she wouldn’t be able to gain skills so easily. What the viewers get impressed by is her sincere attitude towards acting.
What sort of research did you do?
Firstly, I thought I needed to do proper research about crush videos, a motif of the film, because I am not a crush video fan or a creator of crush videos. There are lots of things I didn’t know about, then some acquaintances put me in touch with a director of crush videos and I watched some crush videos as well. However, of course, I was not making a documentary film so I pondered how I could insert crush videos as a drama component into the film.
Did you do storyboarding for the film, because every shot is perfectly?
I have never drawn storyboards because I can’t decide what I want to do without seeing actual performances at the location. I need to see the presence of the actors on the set, how things look like through the camera or angle of the shot.
And, I want to value cameraman’s sensitivity or feelings.
Yes, it’s really impressive because you used a variety of different techniques.
Ah, that wasn’t me. We have an excellent cameraman, well…cinematographer.
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You were at the Slamdance Film Festival in America with this film. Have you noticed a difference between the way that Japanese audiences and Western audiences react to this film?
Today’s screening was the Japanese premiere of the film, so it is a bit hard to say, but I didn’t see much difference in the audience reaction between here and US. In the US, I received a nice comment from the audience saying it was a nicely balanced story and very interesting. And the main actor, Aya Kitai, her presence was brilliant.
Do you think it is important to display working-class life?
Yes, It’s a reflection of society in Japan. The social condition of the country is clearly reflected on there.
Are you inspired by someone like Ken Loach?
Yes, I really like Ken Loach. But please take this comment as a joke, I wanted to avoid my film being like a lecture so I took a different approach. I respect Ken Loach though…
It’s a good approach, it is a good film. One last question, what would you want audiences to take away from the film?
It’s not a happy end but it wouldn’t leave you just with despair or a pessimistic view of life. I would be happy if the audience has a positive thought for their life when they see the main character’s strength and growth.
She never gives up and that’s the main thing. Thanks for the interview and thanks again making this film. I hope the next screening goes well.
Welcome to another weekend of badly translated trailers. I’m at the end of another 12-day work period so this weekend is going to be savoured. My spare time has been spent watching films and writing about them while listening to podcasts.
I started this week on a high with a post about the Kanazawa Film Festival and I ended it with the last of my Osaka Asian Film Festival coverage for this year – a review for Demolition Girl and an interview with that film’s director Genta Matsugami. I may do a round-up post and a comment on the awards ceremony but the New York Asian Film Festival has started and I have material to release for that, specifically reviews for Samurai Marathon and The Fable which have already been published. That written, I have a couple of posts about different festivals to release next week… Also, I got some Japanese beer from a friend in work so that helped me survive an evening of the heatwave that has struck Britain…
This seems to be based on a real-life scandal involving Japan’s current Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, and his right-wing government. Suicide involving public officials and government-funded schools. Do the characters have what it takes to risk their careers for the truth? It plays at Japan Cuts next month.
Synopsis from Japan Cuts because it’s great: Yoshioka (Eun-kyung Shim) is a Tokyo reporter with truth-seeking zeal haunted by her father’s destroyed journalism career and subsequent suicide. Meanwhile, Sugihara (Tori Matsuzaka) is a bureaucrat on a glide path to promotion who comes upon a shady government-funded school that could point to a historic cover-up. Together, they must decide what to do when doing the right thing feels like self-sabotage. Based on journalist Isoko Mochizuki’s book, Michihito Fujii’s thriller recalls All the President’s Men in its depiction of journalism’s civic duty, replete with bustling newsrooms, late night leak intercepts and whirring printing presses.
Synopsis: Kaori (Ryoko Shinohara) is a single mother raising her daughter Futaba (Kyoko Yoshine) alone. Futaba has entered her rebellious phase and ignores her mother so Kaori decides the best way to communicate with her daughter isby creating messages in the bento meals Futaba takes to high school.
Synopsis: A man named Ikuo (Shingo Katori) spends his days drinking and gambling and when his debts become too much he is forced to move with his partner Minami (Yuri Tsunematsu) and her daughter to her home–town of Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture. Things get back on track after Minami opens up a beauty salon and he becomes a fishermanand it seems like happiness is within reach for the three but things begin to happen as her ex-husband comes back on the scene and Ikuo gets mixed up with more bad characters and then Minami dies…
Synopsis:High school boy Tetsu has a secret – a pale shapeless creature for a pet which he calls Cenco. What it is and where it’s from is a mystery, one that doesn’t bother Tetsu so much but has his classmate Yuki interested. Tetsu isn’t the only one with a creature as Shu, another classmate, has two. Soon, a giant creature similar to theirs appears from an interdimensional portal over their town one evening. With the army activated, a kaiju battle ensues and it will sweep the kids along with it…
Synopsis:Hatsumi Narita (Miona Hori) is an ordinary high school student who, due to a moment of bad judgement, ends up being in an abusive relationship with Ryoki Tachibana (Hiroya Shimizu) who lives in the same apartment building as her. She really likes her childhood friend Azusa Odagiri (Mizuki Itagaki) and when moves back to into the area, Azusa makes moves on Hatsumi. He is super-handsome and a popular model and seems to care about her but he has secret motives…
Synopsis:Tatsuya Ishii won the JFF Special Award at the Pia Film Festival Award 2018 for Subarashiki Sekai. Here, he chases the concept of true love through the self-documentary format as he revisits time spent with an old lover. They had been dating for two years and she was in a mental ward of a hospital after the breakdown of the relationship. Ishii recorded their relationship while together until it got too bad. Then, one day, after a call from her, he visited her house with a camera in hand and talked to her to find out she had lost two years of her memory.
The next three films were produced by the Yoshimoto Comedy agency who worked in different regions across in Japan. These films get screened at the Okinawa Film Festival, I believe.
Anata ga koko ni iro dake de munekata Sanshimai Monogatari
あなたがここにいるだけで むなかた三姉妹物語「Anata ga koko ni iro dake de munekata Sanshimai Monogatari」
Synopsis:This drama was produced in 2017 in commemoration of Okinoshima, in Munakata City, Fukuoka Prefecture, being registered as a World Cultural Heritage Site. Known as “The island where the gods live” it is also the place where the youngest of three sisters works at a primary school. She explores the island and meets various people to understand the place.
Synopsis: A young woman named Ayano who lives alone in a city finds an unexpected visitor in the shape of a pear. She names it “Tamako”. Meanwhile, in the countryside, a pear farmer named Satoko notices that one of the pears is missing and it has been replaced by a bloody fang.
Synopsis:Moji in Kitakyushu City, Fukuoka Prefecture, is a trading city that draws a photographer who spent some time there years ago before Mojiko Retro, a tourist attraction with many historic buildings, became a big draw for outsiders. He isn’t the only on interested in the old city because, as he’s shown around by a local, he meets a woman haunted by the place.
Synopsis:TV Shizuoka made a documentary series that covered 20 years of a family that includes a totally blind older sister and a seriously disabled brother. She has been able to go to a school for the blind but has experienced loneliness and bullying and even thought about suicide. He is not able to do much in terms of basic movement due to his severe disabilities and has been in and out of hospital many times. Despite the hardships they have suffered they keep living because they bring out the best in each other.
Synopsis:Chonthicha is the daughter of a Burmese mother and a Thai father and was raised in Japan. Following her parent’s divorce, she lives with her mother and her new partner, Takahashi. She has been trying to lead a quiet life but things get complicated when she reaches her 16th birthday…
Synopsis:Atsushi Muroga likes directing action films. I first became aware of him in high school with his title Junk and, since then Score and some of the Gun Crazy franchise. Here, he directs a film about the misadventures of the staff who work at a pizza shop called “Cats & Dogs”. The home delivery team are a four-man operation, a super-chef and the pretty female manager. Of course, some of the orders and clients they get are outrageous…
Synopsis:Princess Vanilla lives in a land of ice cream but is unable to create ice cream herself. Fed up with her lack of ability, she flees her palace, and soon meets Anpanman and Kokin-chan. While travelling with them, she learns the reason why she can’t create ice cream. Meanwhile, Baikinman attacks the land of ice cream while Princess Vanilla is missing.
Synopsis:A movie adaptation of the “Patalliro!” stage-play. It is based on a manga that has been serialised for over 40 years since it began in 1978. The cast of the 2016 musical version appear here. The story concerns Crown Prince Patalliro de Mariner VIII who, with his cadre of beautiful boys, travels around through space, the British Empire and Saitama Prefecture…
Synopsis:The anime’s story takes place in a world where Frame Arms Girls exist. These are small robots capable of independent movement and lead character Ao has recently acquired Gourai, a newly-developed prototype equipped with an an AI that gives her a personality. Ao helps Gourai acquire new knowledge and feelings as well as battle data each and every day.
It’s not often that Korean animation gets screened so the “Dreaming Korea Animation” animation event is a special one and it takes place really close to Ikebukuro Station!
“Dreaming Korea Animation” is a one-day event held on July 27th, 2019 at Cine Libre Ikebukuro and there will be a number of films and music videos screened across three programmes. There are guest animators in town to do talks with two from Japan and three from Korea so this makes the event a brilliant chance to see some of the creativity on offer from Korea.
Programme A – 12:20 – 13:50 Film Screening and Director Talk
Ahn Jae-Hoon is one of the directors of the Korean animation studioMeditation With a Pencil. They released their first feature length film Green Days in 2011. Their subsequent feature film projects were animated adaptations of Korean short literature titles, The Shower being their latest work. It receives its Japanese premiere at this event.
This has been described as a beautiful animated film and it is based on a classic Korean short story of a tragic adolescent love by Hwang Sun-won. It is supposed to be simple so it might be best to go into this expecting luscious visuals rather than plot.
Synopsis:A little girl who often plays at a brook draws the attention ofa shy little boy who hovers around her but lacks the bravery to talk to her. Not impressed, she picks up a pebble, turns around and throws it at the boy and shouts, “You fool!”This is the start of something deeper because, as the two explore the surrounding countryside on different days their feelings for one another grow and, one day, a sudden rain shower brings them closer together but…
Sunao Katabuchi (Black Lagoon, In This Corner of the World) will hold a conversation with Ahn Jae-Hoon so this is an exciting opportunity to hear one of Korea’s great film-maker’s speak on the craft of animation.
Programme B– 14:15 – 15:45 Dedicated to the short films of Yeon Sang-ho
If you know the name Yeon Sang-ho it will probably be because of his live-action works Train to Busan and Seoul Station. He started his career in animation and his most famous animated films are The Fake (2013) and The King of Pigs (2011). He will be at the festival with three shorts made between 2006 and 2012:
The Hell: Two Kinds of Life (2006)
Love Is Protein (2008)
The Window (2012)
A video message from Yeon Sang-ho will be shown to audiences in this section.
Programme C – 16:00 – 18:00 Korean and Japanese Animation, Music Videos and Talks
Hoji Tsuchiya (Vimeo filmography) is an artist and popular director of shorts and music videos. He works on Planet Family at NHK Educational Television (more of his filmography) and has won many awards. He will be hosting a compilation of 11 music videos from Korea and Japan and also conducting a talk with two Korean directors, Han Ji-won and Lee Jong-hoon. Hoji Tsuchiya is also going to have a video played, “A Long Dream”
This one is particularly interesting because you get to see works by Sarina Nihei! She worked on “Fenn” for the musician Tom Rosenthal
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All of the films across programmes A and B will have Japanese subtitles
The Fantasia International Film Festival starts in Montreal next week on July 11th and runs until August 01st. As with last year, the selection of Japanese films is great with titles with many titles that have graced screens at fests like the New York Asian Film Festival and Annecy (and soon, Japan Cuts) appearing here in one place. The animation selection is incredible and there are some choice live-action titles to get behind.
This is the 23rd edition of the festival and it has become a focal point for filmmakers, festival programmers, journalists, and audiences eager to see a diverse slate of films before they hit DVD or the internet and cinema screens. There are recent releases and ones that won’t get released in Japan until next year. There is also the chance to take part in film culture and meet film-makers and fellow film fans. There are lots of guests and great experiences to be had and a chance to get involved with dictating which films get the hype behind them, so please choose Japanese, and try some of the titles listed here. All information has been compiled from IMDB, this festival’s site and other festival sites.
So what’s lined up? Click on the titles to be taken through to the festival page for each film.
Live-Action
There’s a rich mixture of indie and commercial features that have been programmed. Souichi Umezawa, director of Vampire Clay, has a short playing at the festival, The Realm Below. There’s more horror in the form of…
It has been six years since films had Sadako crawling out of screens. The character, once so terrifying, has lost her edge since Ringu so will this film be a rehabilitation? The cast doesn’t look like it’s made up of serious actors, the plot has been updated to give a nod towards current viewing habits of teens and the poster is awful. However, Hideo Nakata is back on board!
Synopsis: A girl with amnesia (Himeka Himejima) is being treated by a psychologist named Mayu (Elaiza Ikeda) who is trying to find out more about her background. Mayu’s younger brother Kazuma (Hiroya Shimizu) is a YouTuber eager for views who, on the advice of a friend, heads to a burnt out apartment where 5 people died which is the scene of psychic trauma and he accidentally catches Sadako. Mayu must stop a new curse from breaking out.
The Fable has been published in Kodansha’s Young Magazine since 2014 and is still going. The movie version has a good cast with Junichi Okada taking the lead and a great supporting cast with the likes of Ken Mitsuishi, Koichi Sato (Starfish Hotel), Ken Yasuda, Yuya Yagira (Destruction Babies) taking roles. There’s also Sota Fukushi. He starred with Okada in the Library Wars live-action adaptations.
Synopsis: Fable is a legendary contract killer who was trained to be a killer when he was a young boy. He is ordered to lay low for one year and tries to live a normal life in Osaka as an ordinary person with the name of Akira Sato and he will be joined by his hard-drinking assistant Yoko who will pretend to be his sister. Sato tries to fit in by getting a job and maybe even catching a girl but an internecine yakuza gang war threatens to suck him in…
Synopsis: In a world where ghouls live amongst humans, a university student named Ken Kaneki (Masataka Kubota) finds himself caught between two worlds because he is half-ghoul and half-human. While he looks human, he must eat flesh. He shelters himself at Anteiku Cafe, a place run by friendly ghouls including Toka Kirishima (Maika Yamamoto). One day, a frightening new ghoul named Shu Tsukiyama (Shota Matsuda) appears at Anteiku Cafe. He is called the “Gourmet” and has plans for Kaneki.
Synopsis: Mizuki and Haruo are two students who find themselves sucked into a horrific string of deaths after the death of a friend and a brother respectively. The deaths all involve a heart attack visibly provoked by extreme fear and the victim’s eyes literally explode. They search for clues as to what is going on but when one potential source dies, all they have to work on is the name Shirai-san. Mamiya, a journalist, is also investigating and joins the two as they get sucked into a gory horror story.
Synopsis: Yoshiko Chiwaki (Shiori Yoshida) was thought to be a popular young woman but when her dismembered body is found in Tokyo Bay people begin to have doubts, not least her friends who realise they do not know anything about her like her real identity or her background. Chiwawa, the name she had given herself because of her small size, was beautiful, cheerful and charismatic but went to extreme lengths to be the object of everyone’s attention and had a shadow side to her life. One of Chiwawa’s friends, Miki (Mugi Kadowaki), is now trying to figure out what happened. Through the witnesses of this descent into hell, she will try to solve the riddle of Chiwawa.
Get hyped for this one! Excellent director and excellent cast. Tetsuya Nakashima is back after making The World of Kanakoand he brings some of the stars from that film, Satoshi Tsumabuki (Rage, Gukoroku) and Nana Komatsu (Samurai Marathon and the lead actress in The World of Kanako) as well as Takako Matsu (Dreams for Sale). The trailer looks intense and this is a film that many Japanese film fans are anticipating.
Synopsis:Newlyweds Hideki and Kana Tahara are awaiting the arrival of their first child, a girl they plan to name “Chisa” and life seems to be going smoothly but everything is thrown out of whack when a mysterious person visits Hideki’s workplace and leaves a note with the cryptic message, “about Chisa-san case”. Now, Hideki and Kana are the only ones who know what they plan to name their daughter so that’s odd but stranger things happen when the colleague who passed Hideki the note is killed and Hideko and Kana’s home is attacked… To protect his family, Hideki asks for help from a journalist named Nozaki and a prestigious exorcist because what they are dealing with is something totally unnatural and mind-blowing...
Popular actor Takayuki Yamadahas produced this crime drama starring rising star Shinnosuke Abe, the hapless teacher in Ordinary Everyday (2017).
Synopsis:Koji Akashi’s (Shinnosuke Abe) returns to his family home for his father’s funeral. His father committed suicide following him blowing the whistle on a corporate scandal and finding the whole village being turned against him by the company. The injustice is still raw. Then he meets a man named Kitamura (Masanobu Ando) who works for an orphanage which is under threat of closure. Kitamura commits “moral” crimes by “punishing” the immoral – drug dealers, thieves and so forth. Kitamura asks him for help protecting the children. The two men go to extreme lengths as Akashi develops a thirst for vengeance…
Hosted by Director and Screenwriter Shinobu Yaguchi and Producer Ryo Kaneko
Synopsis: Shizuka is a dedicated salarywoman preparing for a big meeting at the financial company she works at but after visiting a shady hypnotist named Martin-san with her niece, she is left under a spell which causes her to break into song and dance whenever she hears music, even if it’s just a ringtone. Shizuka needs to get her head fixed for the meeting in order to save her career and so she goes on the hunt for the hypnotist who has disappeared and so starts a road-trip musical!
A film based on a novel by Yasushi Sato is usually something to take notice of after a series of good to great adaptations. Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Over the Fence is good, while Sketches of Kaitan City by director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, and Mipo Oh’s The Light Shines Only There are great. The three are set in the author’s native city of Hakodate in the north of Japan but this film was originally set in Tokyo before being relocated to Hakodate. There’s a great cast with Shota Sometani (Himizu), Shizuka Ishibashi (The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue), and Tasuku Emoto (Dynamite Graffiti).
Synopsis:The unnamed protagonist (Tasuku Emoto), simply referred to in the credits as “Boku” is a slacker who works at a bookstore while sharing an apartment with his unemployed friend, Shizuo (Shota Sometani). “Boku” begins dating his co-worker Sachiko (Shizuka Ishibashi), strong-willed young woman who allows herself to get roped into his aimless life, but Shizuo soon gets involved and a love triangle develops…
Director Nobuhiro Yamashita (The Drudgery Train) is a director who can bring out all sorts of different tones in stories and the story for this one is truly bizarre but it is also sorrowful according to write-ups. It also has a cast is to die for! Takako Matsu, Takayuki Yamada (13 Assassins), Takeru Satoh (Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno) and YosiYosi Arakawa (Fine, Totally Fine).
Synopsis: Deep in the hills and mountains of Gunma Prefecture dwells a pure-hearted man by the name ofUkon Gondo (Takayuki Yamada). Ukon has a handsome brother, Sakon (Takeru Sato), who works for a trading company but Ukon prefers to be free from a society he sees as superficial and tries to make a living by mining for a right-wing tyrant who is searching for the lost gold of the Shogun. Ukon is working with another man, Ushiyama (YosiYosi Arakawa) who isn’t too bright. They are soon to be joined by a third teammate, a robot they discover at an abandoned factory that Ushiyama lives in. The robot looks a little like a trashcan but it has great potential and the two men, plus Sakon resolve to change their lives with its help.
Synopsis: The Makai Knights are an ancient order of warriors who have long protected humanity against creatures known as Horrors. Assuming the aspect of Golden Knight Garo, Raiga Saezima has vanquished one such demonic creature, but his magical armour has been tainted with evil. Furthermore, a Knight of the dark has materialized, and taken hold of a woman named Mayuri, someone so dear to Raiga that he sets off to rescue her. Raiga must board a mysterious train destined for the netherworld. As he advances through the cars of this train, Raiga comes ever closer to confronting his own hidden truths…
Mugi Kadowaki, a strong actress as can be seen in Double Life (2016) and Hanagatami(2017), is our entryway into the heady world of radical filmmakers of the 60s and 70s.
Synopsis: Political/pink film director Koji Wakamatsu died seven years ago but his presence is still felt in the Japanese film industry as acolytes and collaborators still operate. This film takes a year of his life but frames it through the eyes of someone else, 21-year-old Megumi (Mugi Kadowaki), who joins Wakamatsu Production in the hope of becoming someone worthwhile. There, she meets Wakamatsu (Arata Iura) who has a cadre of young talents dedicated to movie making. Megumi’s world opens up…
Synopsis: The nerdy Hajime Machida (Kanata Hosoda) is a bit flaky when it comes to studies and sports but he’s a lovable guy who gets along well with other people and his ever-flowing goodwill has earned him the nickname “Jesus Christ” from his fellow students, and made him somewhat of an object of fascination from the opposite gender. Of course, the young saint has no time, nor care, for romantic entanglement, but one day, he meets Nana (Nagisa Sekimizu) at the school’s infirmary. She is his polar opposite in some ways but her unthinking act of kindness towards him capsizes Machida’s very black-and-white vision of the world.
This has won awards and plaudits at Sundance and it was at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year. It has an otaku aesthetic with 8-bit computer games being a big influence. Some really great actors are in this one and it has a lot of buzz from people who have seen it.
Synopsis:Hikari, Ikuko, Ishi and Takemura, all aged 13, meet by chance at a crematorium. All four have recently lost their parents in absurd circumstances — a car accident, murder, suicide, and an explosion! All four also suffer from the same startling problem: they are unable to feel any emotion about their loss. Faced with uncertain futures and having only one another, the group mutates into a surrogate family amid the ruins of childhood innocence forever lost. From one adventure to the next, they try to find their emotions, until they reinvent themselves completely, donning extravagant outfits and forming a band which might just challenge their deadening malaise and give them a reason to be again. Only one band name could possibly do: they will be called Little Zombies! Soon enough, they are a viral phenomenon taking the country by storm, and quickly attracting the attention of the industry…
Synopsis:A young woman is heading to Tokyo with her parents for her engagement. She’s extremely excited to leave the banal and boring prefecture of Saitama, much to the chagrin of her father, proud of his patch of the map. In order to soothe him, Mom turns on the radio, landing on a drama about the inhabitants of Saitama facing oppression by the powers of nearby Tokyo. They must even obtain visas to enter the capital, and live in total stigma. Aggressively embodying this contempt, Momomi (Fumi Nikaido) is the son of the governor of the megacity, and chairs the student council of a prestigious academy. His comfy universe is turned upside down by the charismatic Rei (Gackt), a student recently arrived from the United States. For the first time, his supreme popularity is threatened. Momomi develops a fierce rivalry with Rei, but this hate turns into an uncontrollable attraction. When a police intervention reveals Rei’s reprehensible roots, Momomi overcomes his visceral disgust and flees with him to Saitama.
Kotaro Yoshida takes over from Ren Osugi in portraying a man who reconnects with his son through playing Final Fantasy XIV on the PlayStation 4. Kiyoshi Yamamoto will be hosting the screening.
Synopsis: Akio (Kentaro Sakaguchi) knows a lot about his virtual “friends” in the realm of Eorzea. The players behind the avatars in Final Fantasy XIV are happy to share their daily details, especially after a big win together. But his own father, Akira (Kotaro Yoshida), remains a mystery, as he has been ever since Akio was a small boy. The distance between the workaholic salaryman and his now-adult son seems greater than ever when Akira, on the verge of a big promotion and raise, suddenly announces his retirement. Recalling his fondest childhood memories, bonding with his dad over 8-bit victories in the earliest Final Fantasy games, Akio hatches a plan. He’ll convince his father to take up gaming, befriend him anonymously within the online world, and rebuild their connection. Operation Dad the Warrior of Light is a go! But real life isn’t a game, and Akio can’t be sure of his surefire moves…
Seasoned thesps such as Kaoru Kobayashi and Toshie Kobayashi work alongside the quietly brilliant Kou Shibasaki (Maison de Himiko) here.
Synopsis: Daikichi (Shinosuke Tatekawa) is a 70-year-old widower who lives on a small island with his cat Tama. The island is overrun with cats and mainly populated by the elderly so it’s an easy-going place. Daikichi’s son Tsuyoshi (Takashi Yamanaka), who lives in Tokyo, is worried about his father living alone on the island, especially as his physical condition worsens with age. Daikichi and Tama’s daily life begins to change when a woman named Michiko (Kou Shibasaki) opens a cafe for the island’s mostly elderly residents…
Synopsis: When a stranger with conflicting values joins a village whose inhabitants are closely knit, communal harmony may be affected. This is the case with Hiroshi. When he takes off with the family nest egg, just when his wife is giving birth to their first son, the villagers chase him down and violently beat him. He’s only spared at the last minute by the Reverend’s good graces. Thirty years later, Hiroshi’s scars are still present, except now they’re being borne by his son Shinichi. Depressed, traumatized and lazy, even his family sees his father’s bad blood within, persecuting him to the point of banishment from the village. He seeks shelter with the same Reverend who saved his father’s life years ago. Meanwhile, not far away, the latter continues his degenerate life. As the head of a small band of hoodlums, Hiroshi commits petty con jobs. One failed job too many forces him to hide out at the Reverend’s too. Shinichi and Hiroshi are totally clueless about their shared lineage and the man of the cloth plans to keep it that way, if only to move one and reason with the other.
Shinsuke Sato is an action movie director who you may have heard of thanks to live-action versions of multiple manga like Gantz, I Am a Hero, and Inuyashiki. He tackles a historical epic with Kingdom which is based on Yasuhisa Hara’s novel which has already been adapted into an anime.
Synopsis:In 255 BC, a fratricidal war has divided China into seven kingdoms. Shin (Kento Yamazaki) and Hyou are two war orphans who aspire to become great generals and it is Hyou who gets picked to fight for the Qin dynasty first but when he is fatally wounded following an assassination attempt on king Eisei (Ryo Yoshizawa), Shin takes the lead and sets off on an adventure that will see him try to help the exiled monarch win back his throne and face many grave dangers including sadistic assassins and the troops of Seikyou the usurper and his legendary generals.
This title consists of 14 short films which last 8 minutes each with an animated end-title sequence. Each work is by a female director born in either the late ‘80s or ‘90s so they are all under 30. It features a roster of familiar names from international festivals like Aya Igashi, Momoko Fukuda (Slowly) – here’s an interview with Momoko Fukuda – , Aimi Natsuto (Jeux de Plage) and Yoko Yamanaka (Amiko) and lots of familiar actors like Ai Hashimoto (The Kirishima Thing), Rena Matsui (Dear Etranger), Erisa Yanagi, Shizuka Ishibashi, Mei Kurokawa, Sairi Itoh (Love and Other Cults), Kiki Sugino (Snow Woman), and Kaho Minami. It was screened at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival and I combined details from that with the synopses from Fantasia.
Essentially, these are films made by women primarily for women and aim to capture the female experience. Please read this article on the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan website for more information.
Synopsis:Gintoki Sakata (Shun Oguri), Shinpachi Shimura (Masaki Suda) and Kagura (Kanna Hashimoto) of the Shinpachi odd-job agency are short on money and forced to look part-time work when they go broke and they meet the Shogun. They aren’t the only ones with problems because, the Shinsengumi is split between different factions and conflict is brewing.
This one has been licensed by Third Window Films and it has played at a couple of festivals already including Nippon Connection. As the release dates above show, it originally comes from 1985 and got a re-release last year. It was directed by Macoto Tezuka, son of manga legend, Osamu Tezuka. His short, “Unk“, a story where a girl is abducted by aliens and taken to their city, will also be screened with the film.
Synopsis from Third Window Films: In 1985, Macoto Tezuka met musician and TV personality Haruo Chicada who had made a soundtrack to a movie which didn’t actually exist: The Legend of the Stardust Brothers. At the time Macoto was just 22 years old, a film-student with many short experimental films under his belt, but, with Chicada as producer, Tezuka would make his feature-film debut by adapting this “fake soundtrack” into the real movie story of “The Stardust Brothers”.
With inspiration from “Phantom of the Paradise” and “Rocky Horror Picture Show”, Tezuka assembled a cast of some of Japan’s most famous musicians of the time, including such greats as Kiyohiko Ozaki, ISSAY, Sunplaza Nakano and Hiroshi Takano, alongside many famous names in Manga such as Monkey Punch (Lupin the 3rd), Shinji Nagashima (Hanaichi Monme), Yosuke Takahashi (Mugen Shinsi) and even many upcoming film directors of the time such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Tokyo Sonata, Cure) and Daihachi Yoshida (The Kirishima Thing, The Scythian Lamb). The resulting film “The Legend of the Stardust Brothers” is the exact definition of a cult film. Despite the huge array of talent on board with a large budget, the film is totally unknown even to this day in both Japan and worldwide. More than 30 years since its release, The Stardust Brothers will finally make itself known worldwide with a new master and a brand new Director’s Cut!
Nao Yoshinaga’s short films
There are four short films by director Nao Yoshinaga:
Synopsis: A young woman named Ayano who lives alone in a city finds an unexpected visitor in the shape of a pear. She names it “Tamako”. Meanwhile, in the countryside, a pear farmer named Satoko notices that one of the pears is missing and it has been replaced by a bloody fang.
Animation
The selection of animated shorts is truly incredible and features some familiar names. Ujicha of Burning Buddha Man and Violence Voyager has a short called Tempura. His style is gekimation which isn’t strictly animation. Death Vendor also provides horror. There’s the aforementioned Makoto Tezuka film Unk. There’s the short Fluffication about cute furry creatures,
Synopsis:Tomoki Misato is a graduate of the Geidai programme and has crafted a lot of great stop-motion films. This one was screened at the Korea Independent Animation Festival earlier this year. This is a dark tale of a mother goat searching for her kids after a wolf devours them. Yes, she will have to go into the wolf but, even after that, she still has to look for one…
Synopsis:The Spirits of Cairn was Shinobu Soejima’s first film and it is supposed to be amazing. This is her follow-up and it’s supposed to be another great stop-motion film. The story is about an imp that lives in a house. The stop-motion animation looks incredible based on the trailer. It must have been time-consuming!
Shishigari and The Girl from the Other Side offer supernatural stories of kids moving across the border of life and death with fantastical creatures by their sides.
Synopsis:An experimental short animation work depicting half of a life of a boy aiming to be a cartoonist. The visual style changes according to the progress and growth of the hero. It starts off in elementary school all the way through to him being a manga artist’s assistant and gives us a glimpse of the life of a professional…
Synopsis: High school boy Tetsu has a secret – a pale shapeless creature for a pet which he calls Cenco. What it is and where it’s from is a mystery, one that doesn’t bother Tetsu so much but has his classmate Yuki interested. Tetsu isn’t the only one with a creature as Shu, another classmate, has two. Soon, a giant creature similar to theirs appears from an interdimensional portal over their town one evening. With the army activated, a kaiju battle ensues and it will sweep the kids along with it…
This is a movie adaptation of the 1981 children’s book “Chikashitsu kara no Fushigi na Tabi”. Director Keiichi Hara (Miss Hokusai)
Synopsis:Akane Uesugi is a shy 6th grader who has trouble telling other people how she feels. The day before her birthday, her mother, Midori, sends her on an errand: to go get her birthday present from her free-spirited Aunt Chi’s antique shop. But a strange man named Hippocrates the Alchemist, who calls her the “Green Goddess”, together with Pipo the fairy, takes her on a journey to “The World Beyond” from a door in the basement where she embarks upon an adventure to save a land in crisis.
Akane’s not the most motivated teenage girl, most of the time. She’s even less thrilled to be sent to visit her aunt Chii — to pick up her own birthday present, no less! Akane is a bit put off by Chii’s daffy, distracted character, but she has always adored looking around at the odd finds in her aunt’s little bric-a-brac store. The oddest thing in the place, though, is one that finds them. Emerging from the basement trapdoor, his top hat and mustache immaculate, is the alchemist Mr. Hippocrates and his elfin apprentice Pipo. He has reason to believe that it is Akane’s destiny to be the Goddess of the Green Wind, who will save a world in crisis, the world beyond. Akane herself is less than convinced, but soon enough, she and Chii are stepping down into the basement — and out of this world!
Synopsis: Tokyo, 2036, and society is deeply divided between the rich and poor. It is only the rich who can access a revolutionary medical discovery involving the use of nanomachines to prolong human life to 120 years and remove the possibility of illness. A poor man by the name of Yozo has no hope of accessing this. However when he joins a friend’s biker gang he finds himself drawn into a conspiracy that unlocks new parts of him…
It’s 2036, and major breakthroughs in medical science have dramatically altered Japanese society. Nanomachines, linked to the SHELL system, defend and repair the body, ensure lifespans of well over a century. The privileged few enjoy the comfort and clean air of the Inside, their protective habitat, while the Outsiders, the luckless masses, contend with terrible pollution, overwork, and the consequences of disconnection from SHELL — the nightmarish transformation of the Lost. Youzou, an edgy young artist gripped by anomie and unsettling visions, can’t even kill himself — one phone call and the SHELL system revives him by remote control. With that option off the table, what’s left to do but join his rambunctious pal Takeichi and his cyborg biker gang on a daring raid to breach the defenses of the Inside? From the conflagration of the attack, however, shocking new truths emerge…
Synopsis: It has been 30 years since bottled-up human rage erupted into a great flame war that engulfed the globe. In the embers of that conflagration, humanity has rebuilt its civilization with every precaution in mind. But all it takes to start a fire is a spark, and there are those who would burn it all to the ground again. It’s up to cocky Galo Thymos and his elite squad of firefighters to keep the peace in the city of tomorrow. Alongside his maverick team — Lucia, Varys, Remi and Ignis — Galo springs into action at the sound of the fire alarm. Gripping tight the controls of powerful, high-tech firefighting machines, they crash in to confront the fiery terrorists of Burnish Mad. The situation is getting hot, some needs to hose the villains down and put them on ice. Burning Rescue… dispatch!
Synopsis: Shin and Kotori have been friends since childhood but ever since Shin lost his mother he has developed a tendency to close himself off from others. These two high-schoolers find themselves confronted with other versions of themselves when two teens from another Japan appear in front of them.
A virus? Aliens? No one knows the cause of the wave of sudden, seemingly random deaths sweeping across Japan in recent years. Tokyo teenager Shin witnessed his mother’s death when he was a child, and ever since has been soft-spoken, sullen and withdrawn. He wants others at a distance, but he can’t seem to push away sweet-natured Kotori, a friend since childhood. He’s not sure he wants to, either. A lively date leads to an auspicious moment, but just as their hearts are about to connect… reality, the very fabric of time and space, reveals itself to be torn in two. There is another Japan, one that has followed a hellish trajectory. Those who rule that Japan have found a way to ours, and they do not come in peace.
Synopsis: Hinako moves to a coastal town to attend university. While there she can indulge her passion for surfing, something which washes away her uncertainty about her future. When a fire breaks out in town, Hinako encounters the young firefighter Minato. As they surf and spend more time together Hinako feels drawn to someone like Minato who devotes himself to helping other people. Hinako also holds a special place in Minato’s heart, and when he suddenly drowns while out surfing alone, he comes back to her as a ghost trapped in water. As everyone else gets over Minato’s death and tries to move on, Hinako comes to depend on his spirit.
Hiroshi Yamamoto is an anime director who may be most familiar for his anime Wake Up, Girls!, which was about idols trying to revitalise a town after the Great East Japan Earthquake. This film, which was crowdfunded, remembers that disaster and uses it as a backdrop for two students trying to overcome their inner problems.
Synopsis: The story is about a high school girl named Sachi Koyama who lives in the rural city of Iwaki in Fukushima Prefecture. She is fitting in well in her new school and is in the music club where she has a big recital coming up at the culture festival but, despite these activities, she likes to be by herself. Her favourite time is twilight Keisuke is another student at her school who spends time by himself. He loves to paint the beautiful landscape, his current project a painting of a sunset. The two have a secret heartache which they might reveal…
Originally released in 2016 for smart phones which are compatible with VR head-sets and Sony’s VR units, this 15-minute work offers an original story in immersive 360° 3D video.
Synopsis from Production I.G:To end the war and protect my wife, I must delete you all…”
Japan, 2025. Technology has been advancing more and more rapidly.
“Brain cyberization” that makes possible direct connections to information networks via the brain, the technology of “prosthetic bodies” that allows humans to change their body parts into cybernetical ones; in this world where such scientific advances have become common, a bombing attack threat is sent to the Japanese government.
The target is an international meeting involving dignitaries from the Republic of Kuzan. The case is entrusted to the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Public Security Section 9.
Section 9’s leader, the full-cyborg Motoko Kusanagi, assembles her team and heads off to trap and eliminate the terrorist.
The Japan Foundation and British Library are working together to put on a series of free film screenings for Japan Foundation’s annual Summer Explorers season in London. I posted about the fantastic line-up for Pre-Summer Explorers! last month and now audiences can enjoy another series of over the top, offbeat narratives featuring psychic shenanigans and epic high school politics in a collection called:
Summer Explorers 2019 : Manga Comes To Life – Live Action Japanese Film Based on Manga
These films are taken from manga and brought to life in highly cinematic ways – apart from Setoutsumi which looks like one extended conversation but I have been informed that it is absolutely hilarious.
Presented and Curated by the Japan Foundation, in collaboration with the British Library (website for the event), here are the location and date details:
Date: 27 July 2019 – 28 July 2019 Venue: British Library, Knowledge Centre Theatre, 96 Euston Road, St Pancras, London NW1
Synopsis: Kusuo Saiki (Kento Yamazaki) is a high school student who was born with psychic powers. As great as that sounds he hesitates using his super powers in front of other people due to a childhood experience and tries to lead a quiet life by hiding his abilities. Unfortunately, his classmates are strange and determined to drag him from his ordinary life into misadventures.
Akira Nagai directed Judge!, the fantastically fun satire of ad agencies, and also the more emotional If Cats Disappeared From the World, which is a quiet drama far from the sparkly craziness of this film.
Synopsis:Teiichi Akaba (Masaki Suda) has a simple dream: to rule his own country. However, first he has to get through high school and he finds that this is the proving ground for those from good families to establish their dominance in an over the top satire of Japan’s elites where bribery, chicanery, and treachery are driven by their lust for power.
This is based on a manga series by Hiroya Oku, the guy who created the super-disturbing horror sci-fi Gantz. Inuyashiki was turned into an anime that turned out to be pretty good. The live-action version is a fun spectacle and a change of pace from the other highlights. Takeru Satoh (Rurouni Kenshin and Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno) stars as the bad guy. Here’s my review.
Synopsis:Ichiro Inuyashiki (Noritake Kinashi) is a salary-man on his way out. Unappreciated at work and at home and freshly diagnosed with cancer, his life looks miserable but things take a drastic turn when he is involved in an explosion. When he regains consciousness, he discovers that he has been transformed into a cyborg. Far from freaking out, he has a new lease of life and decides to use his powers to help those in need. Meanwhile, Hiro Shishigami (Takeru Satoh), a high school student, was also involved in the very same explosion and has gained the very same the powers. He just wants to see the world burn. Two super-powered people do battle in Japan!
Look at the name of the director. Tatsushi Ohmori. He made, The Whispering of the Gods, The Ravine of Goodbye, and Bozo. Three emotionally brutal films. Harsh. Unflinching in their depiction of people causing others misery and feeling misery. Traumatising… Then he makes this light-hearted comedy with Seto & Utsumi, a slice-of-life tale of two friends that is sure to please a wide audience thanks to the chemistry between Masaki Suda (The Light Shines Only There) and Sosuke Ikematsu (How Selfish I Am!)! I have been told that it is hilarious.
Here’s a taste of the film:
Synopsis from the festival site:High school buddies Seto and Utsumi spend their days hanging out by a dry riverbed in Osaka, chatting about girls, cram school and their annoying parents.
I am writing that at 2:20 on Saturday morning because I have woken up super-early. I think it was drinking at a friend’s leaving party. I have chocolate, a slight headache and writing to keep me company in the dark.
What is released this weekend? Lots. The best-looking titles for me are Fukansho ni natte iku korekara no bokura ni tsuite, Me Singing, Me Fall in Love because I like indie films and they look the most interesting. How about you?
Synopsis:This is the second documentary movie dedicated to idol group Nogizaka 46 and in the time since the first film, the group has sold millions of records and held two concerts, one at Meiji Jingu Stadium and the other at Chichibunomiya Rugby Stadium. Between that and graduations of members, there’s a lot to look over for fans.
Synopsis:A “reconstruction” of the Free! Dive to the Future television anime series with extra footage animated. The story follows the swimmers Haruka and Asahi who are in Tokyo together. Following this meeting, Haruka thinks about his middle school years with the others on their team who are each trying to fulfil their own dreams in Tokyo and even Sydney, Australia.
Synopsis:Fourteen-year-old Aoi Hoshino and her brother find out that she and her family are alien monsters. Their parents had hid it from them by making them take a medicine that allows them to assume a human form. However, the medicine begins to lose its effects on Aoi…
Synopsis:The sengoku period may be over but the Shogun, Tokugawa Hidetada, is trying to keep everyone in check and so he sends agents across the land. Shinosuke Aoyama is a samurai and a spy looking into rumours of a rebellion but finds himself drawn to a woman named Yae Kamiya, daughter of the man possibly plotting to overthrow the Shogun, and this happens as his cover gets blown and he has to face off with another samurai also in love with the woman.
Pink film company OP Pictures made a lot of films for a festival last year and they are back with a boy’s love tale.
Synopsis:Yuto is a lonely high school student who attracts the attention and feelings of Aoyama, a new teacher. The two start an exchange diary, and Yuto opens up his mind little by little to Aoyama but, one day, when Yuto is sick, Aoyama tries to steal a kiss which upsets the boy who violently rejects his teacher. Three years later, Yuto comes back into contact with Aoyama but since graduating from high school he has become a host and is in desperate circumstances so he sells his body…
不感症になっていくこれからの僕らについて「Fukansho ni natte iku korekara no bokura ni tsuite」
Release Date: July 05th, 2019
Duration: 30 mins.
Director:Makoto Shimada
Writer: Makoto Shimada(Screenplay), Nobuhiro Mori (Original Stageplay)
Starring: Dai Ikeda, Satsuki, Marika Fukunaga, Gaku Hosokawa,
Makoto Shinada
Synopsis: The story follows a guy named Ken who is struggling with his dream of being a musician in Tokyo. He has lost all songwriting inspiration. He returns to his hometown where he meets his childhood friends Haruka and Taro…
Synopsis:Mongol800 is a Japanese three-piece punk rock band formed by Kiyosaku Uezu, Takashi Gima and Satoshi Takazato, in Urasoe, Okinawa, Japan in 1998. When they were aged 19, they released their first album. In 2001, their second album, “MESSAGE” sold over two million copies despite the guys being on an indie label and since then they have toured Japan, heading to remote islands and big festivals while working on a number of collaborations with artists across generations and genres all while remaining independent from big media demands. The director, who went to the same school as the band and directs their music videos, has brought a film about their 20-year career to the big screen.
Director/fashion photographer Mika Ninagawa makes her return to the screen following Helter Skelter and Sakuran with this film with a cast list rich with stars and it looks super camp and full of a variety of over-saturated colours based on the post alone.
Synopsis:Kanako Oba (Tina Tamashiro) was looking for a decent paying job but didn’t use the usual channel of Hello Work so she ends up being sold to the owner of a diner called Diner. This fancy place with an anonymous name ishas a clientele consisting ofcolourful contract killers and Kanako has no choice to provide good service or she will be killed. The place is run by the rather flamboyant Bombero (Tatsuya Fujiwara). Impeccable manners are demanded from all, especially Kanako who has to serve the sometimes extreme needs of the customers…
This is based on novel “Ichigo no Uta” by Yoshikazu Okada and the musician/actor Kazunobu Mineta and the story is based on seven songs by Mineta’s band Ging Nang Boyz.
Synopsis:When Kota Sasazawa (Yutaro Furutachi) was younger, he and his friend Shinji loved a girl named Sennichi Amano (Shizuka Ishibashi). Shinji died saving Sennichi from a fatal car accident. Kota cannot forget this and his memories are stirred up again when he meets Sennichi for the first time in ten years…
Synopsis:Ryota Hironaga (Arata Iura) and Shoichi Hironaga (Akira Ohashi) are brothers whose parents divorced when they were children. They were raised by their mother in Nagasaki and Ryota has now inherited the glasswork factory his father used to work at. They have lost contact with their father and Ryota feels like he is falling down a similar path as the old man as he has just been divorced. When Shoichi sees their father in town, they try to track down the old man.
Synopsis:A female NEET named Yuko (Sumire Ueno, an idol from Nomakes), heads to Koenji in Tokyo at the invitation of a friend over the internet named Hikaru. The two are fans of a singer named Takuro and his band and plan to meet their idol but their wild imagination and the reality of the man create a conflict for the young lady.
Synopsis:Shigeru Endo is a tanka poet who has been forced to live in bed for the last 35 years due to his cerebral palsy, but has still been able to make poetry thanks to assistants. The documentary, made by a long-standing friend who has made another one about Endo, captures how the poet and his assistants make the best use of his life and his poetry despite his situation. “Entoko” (meaning “where there is an end, where there is a relationship”).
Synopsis:The official documentary of Kawasaki Brave Thunders, a professional basketball team belonging to B.LEAGUE. The operating company was handed over to the DeNA business group in the 2018-19 season and they were branded as the “New Kawasaki Brave Sanders”. They made a good start with two consecutive wins in the opening round, but struggled afterwards. The documentary shows what was going on with the club and team at the time with moments at practice sessions, locker rooms, lodgings, and team meetings.
Synopsis:A documentary that follows the travails of a boxer named Kenichi Yamaguchi, who had been a member of the Osaka Teijin Gym and fought 11 consecutive matches, each a win, since his debut, but had his hopes for a challenge to a Japanese title match dashed because the Japan Boxing Commission failed to set him up with a title match so he quit the group. He moved overseas to fight but was lured back to Japan by an offer of a title match from the Toyo Pacific Boxing Federation, however, Yamaguchi’s return to Japan Boxing Commission was presented as the condition…
The next two short films will be screened at Cinema Rosa in Ikebukuro
Hikari Kankei
光関係「Hikari Kankei」
Release Date: July 06th, 2019
Duration: 26 mins.
Director: Akira Kawachi
Writer: N/A
Starring: Karen Kuno, Keisuke Machida,
This won the Grand Prix at the 2017 Chofu Short Film Competition.
Synopsis:Kimura, a young woman who failed to commit suicide, is using her phone and board. A young man who is unpopular with women takes matters into his own hands in the restroom of a train station. Their two lives meet via their phones.
Hentai Metamorphose
変態 metamorphose「Hentai Metamorphose」
Release Date: July 06th, 2019
Duration: 26 mins.
Director: Tsuyoshi Matsumoto
Writer: Tsuyoshi Matsumoto(Screenplay),
Starring: Aina Tanaka, Mika Hattori, Tomoya Ihara,
Synopsis:Two girls, Akane and Haruka, go to different schools in a small country town. Haruka is in love with Akane but also has a sense of superiority over her. Over the course of a day in early summer, adolescent girls transform into adults.
Starring: Nori Sato, Nene Ito, Titi Hasegawa, Shiotomo Mizui, Shun Yamamoto, Yuugo Migawa,
Synopsis:An adventurous woman who travels the world while pulling a cart meets a female college student who believes in all things cute and fighting for justice. Meanwhile, four men in a baseball club go on a hot spring trip…
Sabu’s films frequently feature hapless heroes thrown into dangerous circumstances where they are subject to spates of seemingly random encounters, weird coincidences and serendipitous occurrences that all eventually fit together like a jigsaw to reveal smartly constructed narratives that seem free-form but actually tease the idea of fate guiding everything. Jam (2018) features this, however, unlike Sabu’s earlier titles like Dangan Runner (1996) and Postman Blues (1997) which are high tension bounce-about thrillers complete with adrenaline fuelled chases, this one follows the trend of his latest works like Mr Long (2017) and Miss Zombie (2013) by being more contemplative and downbeat. Jam still has time for an awesome chase.
The tail-end of the aforementioned chase on the streets of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, starts the film as a man is about to be run down by an out of control car before the narrative rewinds things to 48 hours earlier. The man is Hiroshi (Sho Aoyagi), an enka idol who serenades his audiences from the stage but, despite the lovely lyrics of unforgettable romance, proves to be super disingenuous as he heartlessly fleeces his middle-aged fan-base who shower him with gifts, money and affection. One fan named Masako (Mariko Tsutsui) wants the perfect performance from him and to set this up she drugs him and takes him home to help him “prepare”. Masako is a slim lady so it’s fortunate that she gets help from Takeru (Keita Machida) who drives by in his car and gives them a lift to her home. This is just one of five good deeds he performs every day in the hopes that his girlfriend wakes up from the coma she is in. Why five good deeds? God told him to do it. Last but not least is Tetsuo (Nobuyuki Suzuki), a man who wants to take revenge on the yakuza who let him take the fall for a crime that left him in prison. Upon his release, the day of Hiroshi’s kidnapping, he heads to the gang’s hideout with nothing but a hammer and a desire to punish his betrayers. After meting out some justice, he heads home to his grandmother’s place and takes her out in her wheelchair to the train station as the gang look for him to get revenge.
These people find their lives intersect and the truth of who each person is and how they come to meet in a potential traffic accident is unfurled with skill as initially unconnected sequences from totally separate narratives emerge and combine to enhance the overall narrative with poise and show that maybe fate does play a hand in things.
At the root of the story is the idea of karmic justice and the three men, lost in some form of self-conceit and trapped by circumstances, act in such a way that the universe responds by drawing them down certain paths until they are forced together to face a reckoning, something which is nudged forward by glimpses of supernatural beings as well as a certain human desperation that gives their journeys poignancy and meaning.
The film was made under the auspices of the LDH production, the parent company of which manages the Gekidan EXILE group so many members from that group take roles in the film. Nobuyuki Suzuki and Keita Machida do a good job as their characters bringing different tones with their hard-boiled and easygoing personas respectively. Sho Aoyagi (who performed quite movingly for Sabu on Mr. Long) proves really effective as the highly conceited crooner who is burnt-out before his years. He brilliantly shows the gap between the fantasy he presents his fans and the reality of his cynicism and it leads to a hilarious take-down brought about by his number one fan, the lonely and obsessive Masako. There is equal parts humour and tragedy in the barnstorming performance that Mariko Tsutsui gives as the woman. She is utterly charming as the fan made deranged by loneliness and desperation that she tugs on our heartstrings with every look of hope and giddiness she gives so that Masako gets redeemed at the end in an emotionally moving sequence that shows the pure love she puts into her actions and it helps to believably redeem Aoyagi’s character Hiroshi.
Direction is perfect although while the film is billed as an action comedy there is grit and melancholy that the black humour is couched in. The fights are kinetic and physical enough to keep the movie pulsing, especially with a lot of shakeycam camerawork backing up the actors who throw themselves around enough to make it look like a scuffle, but Sabu recaptures some of his early career verve with the breathless chase sequence where different characters are running through shotengai and driving on the road, inter-cutting their chaotic journey together in the lead-up to a satisfying finale where this tragicomic narrative ends by showing everyone is redeemable, if they make the right choices, and the ending suggests that, while hard, some form of peace can be found in life so long as you put in good work.
Jam Dir: Sabu (2018) will be screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival on July 08th at 18:30. It will be followed by Sabu’s 2017 film Mr. Long at 21:15. Both films will be shown with Sabu in attendance for a Q&A.
Moon Sung-Ho was first mentioned on this blog in 2014 with his NDJC film Michizure. Originally from Hiroshima, after graduating from high school, he studied film-making in South Korea and then returned to Japan to shoot commercials and short films according to the NYAFF biography. This is his debut feature based on an original screenplay by veteran writer Naomi Hiruta and it has a weird energy thanks to its dark heart, a story so concerned with death and exploitation, and a light delivery in terms of direction and the script/actor’s as well the sunny daytime action.
The titular 5 million dollar life belongs to Mirai Takatsuki (Ayumu Mochizuki). When he was young he had a life threatening disease but he was saved thanks to his local community who donated five hundred million yen ($5 million) to pay for his open-heart surgery. This made him something of a celebrity especially with an annual television show broadcast about him tracking his life since that moment. As he has grown up he has struggled to “repay” the life-saving act of generosity given to him by the public and as he tries to maintain an honourable and pleasant facade and appear as a do-gooder in public although he feels increasingly disaffected by his situation and has developed something of an inferiority complex as he doubts he can live up to his media image.
In reality he is an alienated high school student who feels he cannot live up to the price-tag given to him, so alienated he decides to commit suicide and writes down his intentions on SNS which is how he receives a message from a stranger which states, “if you want to die, you need to return the five hundred million yen first.” This message sets off changes. He decides to leave the comfort of his home and protection of his doting mother and take on different jobs with the intention of earning the money. Once that has happened, he’ll commit suicide. The only problem is that, at the age of 17, getting a job will be hard and he will have to start from scratch and so accomplishing this challenge changes Mirai’s perspective on life as he gets a taste of reality and comes to understand that a person’s value is down to more than just money.
You don’t get to set your own value
What initially sounds like a standard set up for a coming-of-age story quickly escalates into something that surprises as plenty of drama and dashes of comedy and even farcical situations mount up for our naive protagonist Mirai who tumbles from one situation to another and experiences the hardships of life lived by those at the bottom of society from exploited day-workers to yakuza and lonely office ladies. As the narrative progresses a number of issues affecting Japanese society are touched upon from homelessness to sex-work and more and it is done at a fair clip thanks to bouncy pacing so the film manages to dip into the darkness and move on, situations and people giving Mirai a lesson on life that is implemented later in the film as his diverse experiences build him up as a character and keeps audience engagement high.
Throughout his journey there is the sense that his series of misadventures is teaching him but there is the sneaking sense that he is actually really, really selfish as he puts others who genuinely care about him, his mother especially, through an emotional wringer with his absence and silence. What prevents the character from becoming unlikable is the lovely presence of the actor Ayumu Mochizuki who is effervescent and bubbly so that even when he is excessively mopey and mean, such as when he talks directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, he is forgivable. His natural dramatic abilities and also a touch of comedic reactions work well to bolster the playfulness of the film as well as create a character who has depth and learns the extent of his personal value. As he struggles through dark times, he applies the Japanese qualities of gaman and gambarimasu and lets his natural disposition towards being good and his natural kindness shine through, something he clearly lost sight of before the film. Fortunately, others have an idea and let him know and his lesson (and the audience’s) is that the value of our life is determined by others as well as by ourselves.
This is a coming-of-age story married to a road-trip movie with a naive lead prone to falling for deceptionsand getting into increasingly outrageous scrapes and the film surprisingly turns into an astuteexamination of what is important in life: to value ourselves and the people and things around us.
5 Million Dollar Life will get it’s North American premiere on July 11, in competition at the New York Asian Film Festival. Director Moon Sung-ho will be in attendance for an intro and Q&A.
I have reached the end of another 12-day work run and I’m finally catching up on my rest. In that time, I am watching Japanese films!
My review for Lying to Mom(2018) was published over at V-Cinema which wraps up my coverage of the New York Asian Film Festival there, however, it continues on this blog. I posted reviews for the Sabu film Jam(2018) and the Japanese drama 5 Million Dollar Life (2019). Expect more film reviews soon as I catch up with other titles.
Daisuke Miyazaki is a director to watch. With a distinct set of indie films that includes Yamato (California) (2017) and Tourism, Miyazaki has something to say about modern life and youth culture and he shows no signs of stopping. Tourism was the second of a two-part video installation commissioned by the ArtScience Museum in Singapore and Singapore International Film Festival that blossomed into a feature film that could be the first instalment of a longer series. It’s quirky and features a winning performance by Nina Endo. Here’s my review of the film and here’s a link to an interview I did with director Miyazaki at last year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.
Synopsis: Nina and Sue live with a male room-mate in a sharehouse somewhere in Yamato City, Kanagawa Prefecture. Life is quiet and somewhat uninspiring for the three. Like many young people, they work part-time in stores like Tsutaya and Book-Off, study in their spare time, and chase vague dreams of a better life. However, some unexpected excitement enters their world when Nina winstwo tickets for a free trip abroad. A different locale might usher in some excitement and so she departs for Singapore with Sue and what she gets is a true tour of the place.
Two documentaries by Hiroyasu Murakami are released in cinemas and they cover the people and things found at the tidal flats around Tokyo’s Tamagawa river.
Synopsis: A homeless elderly man in his 80’s lives near the estuary of the Tamagawa River and has spent more than a decade in the area. His companions are abandoned cats he has taken in over the years. He catches crabs and farms clams but has a rule that they must not be juvenile ones. However over-fishing by some people has led to a decrease in the number of clams and redevelopment of the area for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics has led to a bridge and high-rise hotels being built along the tidal lagoon. Through this elderly man who has lived and is living through a vast series of changes felt by Tokyo, audiences will experience a little some of the various problems facing modern Japan such as environmental destruction, an ageing society, pet abandonment and inequality.
Synopsis: Yui Yoshida observes the many different crabs in the tidal flats of the Tamagawa River estuary.It is rare to see so many crabs in a large city, and Yoshida, who has been observing crabs independently for 15 years, visits tidal flats every few days and records the ecology of the crabs. The documentary goes out on a tour the tidal flat with Yoshida and looks at the amazing activities of the crabs.
Synopsis: Giovanni, the leader of Team Rocket, had ambitious plans to take over the world, involving his latest experiment, a powerful clone of Mew—Mewtwo. However, Mewtwo escaped from the lab and plans to take over the world by creating a fake event for Pokémon Trainers to participate in. During this event Mewtwo reveals its plan to create powerful clones of all of the Pokémon taking part and rebelling against human control. However, Satoshi’s love of his Pokémon will prove too powerful to break and the mysterious Mew returns…
This is a special edition of a film released last year. It comes with an additional scene and re-editing. Selected films from the Tanabe Benkei Film Festival Selection 2019 are being shown in different cities (June 19-, Tokyo Theatre Shinjuku / July-Osaka Cine Libre Umeda).
Synopsis: Nao Nomura makes his feature film debut with this, a graduation work from Musashino Art University and it won the Entertainment Award at the Pia Film Festival Award 2018. A young lady who works numerous part-time jobs to make ends meet falls in with a painter who wants to use her as his muse. She agrees but she feels uncomfortable and begins to get cold feet which is when she meets writer who also wants to use her as a muse. House-hopping and being looked after can’t hide the emptiness she has inside…
This documentary has toured the festival circuit since it’s debut in Venice last year.
Synopsis: Not a Japanese film but there is a Japanese person at the heart of this documentary, Issei Sagawa, a man infamous around the world for killing and then partially eating fellow student Renee Hartevelt at the Sorbonne in Paris, 1981. Due to his father’s intervention with a lot of money and a top lawyer, he managed to avoid jail time and was declared insane. He may have avoided one type of prison but he lives in another: having to live his life with everyone knowing he committed an act of cannibalism. Since nobody wants to work with him in a regular job and he can only get work recounting his horrific crime in manga, pink films, and magazine article, he is stuck in that role. He tells the audience that it is a terrible fate. This documentary doesn’t condone his deeds or the media-circus around him but seeks to explore his life, especially his background and connection with his brother Jun, who now acts as a carer of sorts. I’ve added this to various film festival posts because I read a really good review of it – very well-written.
Here is a clip and an interview with the filmmakers:
The film won the SPECIAL ORIZZONTI JURY PRIZE at the Venice Film Festival
AH, this takes place in Enoshima. I went there earlier this year. Alas, it was raining a little so I was a bit wet and also very tired after working non-stop in Britain and then travelling to Japan and dealing with jet lag and travelling 9 hours by slow train from Osaka to Tokyo. However, later that day, I visited some friends at their place in Roppongi and got delicious home-cooked okonomiyaki and other delights, which immediately cheered me up. Eating with friends and family is very important.
Anyway, this is based on a TV show.
Synopsis: Kazu (Mario Kuroba) works for an advertising company and lives in a company dormitory with others including Keisuke (Tsubasa Sakiyama), Ippei (Katsuya Kobayashi) and Tadashi (Masashi Oyama) and while life in the world of advertising can be stressful, the group have found the perfect antidote: sharing dinner together!
Kazu will have to miss dinner one week because he is on assignment in Kamakura, his job being to make brochures advertising the restaurants in Enoshima Gourmet Town. It’s an uphill battle for the adman because a lot of the restaurants are small and have no idea about advertising and one Italian restaurant, run by a guy named Tomokazu (Yoji Tanaka), proves nearly impossible to add to the brochure especially as Tomokazu kicks Kazu out of his place but there is a chance: Tomokazu has a daughter who understands the importance of advertising her father’s restaurant.
This is the second feature film depicting Tokyo Fashion & Music Event “Tokyo Boys Collection” and it stars Yuma Teranishi from “the handsome general election” and Asuka Kawazu who also served as the exclusive model at the grand prix of the popular fashion magazine “Seventeen”. No trailer.
Synopsis: oi (Asuka Kawazu) is a 17-year-old girl who auditions to appear in the Cinderella General Election of the Tokyo Boys Collection, which is a gateway to the entertainment world. She is aiming to become an actress, having been influenced by her childhood idol Haruki (Yuma Teranishi), but suddenly discovers she has cancer. Despite this, she does not give up on her dreams and tries to challenge the Cinderella General Election.
A short film by Akira Kawachi, a young filmmaker who was awarded the “20th CHOFU SHORT FILM COMPETITION” Grand Prix for Hikari Kankei, a film released last weekend at Ikebukuro’s Cinema Rosa, where four works by up-and-coming filmmakers Akira Kawachi and Tsuyoshi Matsumoto are being shown.
Synopsis: The main character has an older brother who lives in a remote part of the country who is rumoured to be able to see the future with his eyes. One girl visits to see the future but people find things go in a different direction from what they wanted.
This is a remake of a film Matsumoto made in 2014 which was screened last weekend. The remake won an award at the Pia Film Festival 2018. You can watch a trailer for the film here
Synopsis: Two girls, Akane and Haruka, go to different schools in a small country town. Haruka is in love with Akane but also has a sense of superiority over her. Over the course of a day in early summer, adolescent girls transform into adults.
Over the past month, a number of indie films have been played at Theatre Shinjuku. I have placed them in various trailer posts and have now rounded them up into this one because they all look interesting and will hopefully turn up at other festivals. They are part of the Tanabe Benkei Film Festival 2019 screenings where notable titles have been selected for more screenings and there are two films left for screening and they are the first two in this post:
This one looks like a dark doc about an intense love felt by someone. Maybe we all desire something like that but when we experience it it can be choking. You can follow the film’s director on Twitter here.
Synopsis:Tatsuya Ishii won the JFF Special Award at the Pia Film Festival Award 2018 for Subarashiki Sekai. Here, he chases the concept of true love through the self-documentary format as he revisits time spent with an old lover. They had been dating for two years and she was in a mental ward of a hospital after the breakdown of the relationship. Ishii recorded their relationship while together until it got too bad. Then, one day, after a call from her, he visited her house with a camera in hand and talked to her to find out she had lost two years of her memory.
Synopsis:A 16-year-old boy named Yu (Haruya Dan) lives with his mother but when his father remarries and demands Yu live with him, the boy faces heartbreak and responds with anger over the selfishness of his parents.
Synopsis:Chonthicha is the daughter of a Burmese mother and a Thai father and was raised in Japan. Following her parent’s divorce, she lives with her mother and her new partner, Takahashi. She has been trying to lead a quiet life but things get complicated when she reaches her 16th birthday…
Starring: Nori Sato, Nene Ito, Titi Hasegawa, Shiotomo Mizui, Shun Yamamoto, Yuugo Migawa,
Synopsis:An adventurous woman who travels the world while pulling a cart meets a female college student who believes in all things cute and fighting for justice. Meanwhile, four men in a baseball club go on a hot spring trip…
This is a special edition of a film released last year. It comes with an additional scene and re-editing. Selected films from the Tanabe Benkei Film Festival Selection 2019 are being shown in different cities (June 19-, Tokyo Theatre Shinjuku / July-Osaka Cine Libre Umeda).
Synopsis: Nao Nomura makes his feature film debut with this, a graduation work from Musashino Art University and it won the Entertainment Award at the Pia Film Festival Award 2018. A young lady who works numerous part-time jobs to make ends meet falls in with a painter who wants to use her as his muse. She agrees but she feels uncomfortable and begins to get cold feet which is when she meets writer who also wants to use her as a muse. House-hopping and being looked after can’t hide the emptiness she has inside…
不感症になっていくこれからの僕らについて「Fukansho ni natte iku korekara no bokura ni tsuite」
Release Date: July 05th, 2019
Duration: 30 mins.
Director:Makoto Shimada
Writer: Makoto Shimada(Screenplay), Nobuhiro Mori (Original Stageplay)
Starring: Dai Ikeda, Satsuki, Marika Fukunaga, Gaku Hosokawa,
Makoto Shinada
Synopsis: The story follows a guy named Ken who is struggling with his dream of being a musician in Tokyo. He has lost all songwriting inspiration. He returns to his hometown where he meets his childhood friends Haruka and Taro…
Nobuhiro Yamashita is a director who has a particular forte for downbeat stories, whether they are slacker comedies or dramas, most of which contain misanthropic and misaligned characters who make for uncomfortable yeImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.t interesting leads (think The Drudgery Train). Here, he adapts an obscure manga from the early 90s by writer Marley Carib and illustrator Takashi Imashiro where the characters and the story are sometimes bizarre, sometimes sorrowful but secretly gentle, all of which plays out in a slow and uneven story.
The story takes place in Gunma Prefecture. Deep in the hills and mountains lies a legendary hoard of gold that was once owned by the Shogun. Searching for it is a pure-hearted man by the name ofUkon Gondo (Takayuki Yamada) whose strict moral code makes it difficult to communicate with people he feels are immoral so he follows the orders of a right-wing cult led by an elderly ultra-nationalist named Kaneshiro (Takuzo Kubikukuri) and his loyal henchman, Mizunuma (Suon Kan), both of whom are determined to restore honour to Japanese youth. In truth the only one who truly soothes Ukon’s mind is another man who joins him in his gold excavations, Ushiyama (YosiYosi Arakawa), a strange individual who also finds it hard to socialise but has the desire to have sex.
This duo get into misadventures and painful encounters in the first half of the film and they have no purpose other than to show how isolated and lonely the duo are as their weird personalities make it hard for them to fit in and affecting acting makes these characters totally sympathetic.
Takayuko Yamada (13 Assassins) portrays Ukon perfectly, his handsome looks caught almost in a permafrown as he is too stern and moralistic, his deep voice raised during bouts of anger directed at anyone who is rude and exploitative of other but there are moments of uncertainty when his expression is filled with confusion as he struggles to find the right way to handle situations. YosiYosi Arakawa (Fine, Totally Fine) is heartbreaking and hilarious as Ushiyama, portraying a man who seems to have had a total breakdown at some point as his eyes are always wide and his mouth downcast in sadness or forming a giant “oh” of surprise. Arakawa’s movements and speech are skittish and his casting is perfect as he totally fits his character’s name – “ushi” for cow to describe his bovine face and “yama” for mountain because he’s as big as one. The big guy definitely relies on Ukon for protection and they are a little like the duo in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
Ushiyama cannot get laid for love nor money and Ukon struggles to fit into a society he is disappointed by. However, one day, they are soon to be joined by a third teammate, a robot they discover at an abandoned factory that Ushiyama lives in. He is like a walking washing machine but has hidden super powers. They christen him Robo-o and he proves to be the perfect addition to the gang as he protects them Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.from yakuza, he can fly, and he can search for gold. Once their team is complete, they resolve to change their lives and the plot kicks into gear with the introduction of Ukon’s handsome brother, Sakon (a super slick and hard-nosed portrayal by Takeru Sato – Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno). He works for a trading company and is far more cynical than his older brother so he spies a way to exploit the robot for money by finding the gold and selling it to the Chinese mafia. This initiates a series of crises for Ukon as he breaks his moral code by lying to his boss over the gold and begins to betray everything and everyone he trusts, however, life is hard and he will find the betrayals go two ways…
This is the story of two men destroyed by society, Ushiyama having a tragic backstory that justifies why he is now afraid of everything, and Ukon who is disaffected by modern-day Japan because he wants to live a pure life with no wrong. The two find themselves buffeted by the corruption that surrounds them in sex, work, and politics whilst also trying to control and sate their own desires and being caught in an uncomfortable compromise.
It paints a sad picture of compromise and moral decay when viewed from their perspective although it opens the way for a lot of deadpan humour as they let loose bizarre animal-like passions when allowed to (Disco Time!), misinterpret social interactions, intimidate normal people and find themselves outfoxed and are put in embarrassing situations where they struggle to voice what they want and get exploited or hurt. More comedy is heaped on by seeing Robo-o being passed off as human as he imitates dances and works at the coalmine and roams around the streets in daytime drawing all sorts of comedic reactions. Robo-o also shows lots of empathy for his two new friends and the way he protects them and they adopt him is really charming.
Actually, seeing them play out their friendship and dysfunctions on screen is pretty affecting and very dark so the amount of entertainment, in the standard sense, is limited, but it does build up to a nice shock pay off full of melancholy at the end that will really rock hearts in the audience. The shock is soothed by a gorgeous song, Gentle Night by Ovall, during the end credits which acts as a salve to the hearts of audience members who may be hurt and let them know, life is tough but keep going.
New Directions in Japanese Cinema (NDJC) is a programme that has been in operation since 2007, it’s purpose being to help foster talented young filmmakers through workshops and the production of 30-minute narrative shorts, shot on 35mm film, with the help of experienced professionals. The resulting works are given screenings across Japan and at major festivals. I had covered their films in old trailer posts¹ but had never seen a whole programme until this year…
It was coming up to the end of the 2019 edition of the Osaka Asian Film Festival and there was a screening of this year’s NDJC titles early one morning. I was quite eager to see them and was truly thrilled by the final title, Final Judgement (Saigo no Shinpan) by Shinya Kawakami which is, hands down, the best of the bunch.
Inaba (Ren Sudo) is a talented artist who has tried and failed the entrance exam to Tokyo Art University many times. He is on his sixth attempt and has decided to make this year his final challenge. As he prepares to paint a portrait to pave his way into the institution, a very gifted rival named Hatsune (Miru Nagase) appears amidst the students and her unconventional methods and tremendous vision creates a work which roars with energy and snares the attention of everybody including their tutors. Inaba is incensed by this girl (who is still in school, no less!) but, at the height of his anger he takes a left turn and invites Hatsune to a cafe to find out how she is such a great artist…
Art is communication. No film in the NDJC 2019 line-up illustrated that as much as Saigo no Shinpan, a 25-minute cinematic firework display which uses a lot of editing and audio techniques to give a simple story – one ronin student’s desire to get into an elite Tokyo art university – a propulsive and all encompassing feel that lights up the cinema’s screen with meaning. The story is basically a back-and-forth between what is in the protag’s headspace and the reality around him.
Throughout the film a whole load of techniques are used to convey the character’s psychology and it’s an exciting run from the first scene to the last as the use of sharp editing and camera movement produced a story, at once comedic and intense. The heat is on during painting sessions scored by fierce and percussive jazz music and the image in the frame sways and blurs, the audio drops out of sync with the visuals, the commentary Inaba’s inner voice becomes cracked as the pressure gets to him.
Inaba’s overblown sense of himself is perfectly shown in the fourth-wall breaking moments when he directly addresses audiences and in flashbacks intercut into the narrative along with short and succinct family scenes (featuring Asuka Kurosawa (Cold Fish, Snake of June)), all of which creates a collage of information that dabs different colours of complexity into Inaba’s character and his motivation so he goes from conceited to sympathetic.
Four of the five NDJC 2019 films deal with the theme of fathers in some way but this is the only one that doesn’t belabour the theme or feel trite. The deployment of flashbacks mixed with the exciting art action happening in the present show the hard road Inaba has travelled to even approach the university and it creates a portrait of the conceit he carries borne by desperation and love and how it is at risk of collapse in the face of Hatsune’s genius.
None of this would be truly compelling without the lead performances of Ren Sudo and Miru Nagase who are perfect as Inaba and Hatsune.
Sudo displays his character’s abilities with passion whilst also deliberately making some moments of his arrogance slightly cartoonish to help create the dramatic atmosphere his character is caught up in and also give sufficient height his character will fall if he fails. Miru Nagase is a new name and she effortlessly essays a nonchalantly cool wunderkind who acts as a perfect diametric opposite to Inaba’s arrogant try-hard and she also has a lovely and natural comedic ability to set off needling questions that helps the protagonist grow.
They both have forceful personalities but balance each other out and the ending is satisfying as it shows that the two talents have their futures in their hands.
Director Shinya Kawakami has made commercials and video productions at different companies and has won awards. Here, he tells a familiar story but utilises the NDJC set-up to show off the range of effects cinema has. A lot of information is conveyed with imagination and a fast tempo thanks to the aforementioned music, and visual tricks with additional smash cuts and match cuts that make transitions between different scenes super-exciting. The affect it had on me was like a jolt of caffeine that made me sit up after the previous four films on the programme. Expect to see more of him.
THIS IS A FREE FILM SCREENING SO BLOODY WATCH THIS ONE! IT IS GOOD! YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE NOT TO!
¹ Names that are associated with the NDJC programme include Momoko Fukuda (Slowly, Interview with Momoko Fukuda) who has developed her NDJC 2016 short, Dad’s Wedding, into a feature that will be released later this year. Then there is Sung-ho Moon (5 Million Dollar Life – featured at NYAFF and released this coming weekend in Japan) who was featured in 2014.
I want to start this trailer post by offering my condolences to the people at Kyoto Animation studio for the terrible tragedy they suffered with the arson attack.
It sounds so awful. I’ve used artwork from series made by them on this blog since it started and I work for an animation festival so I’ve come to watch and appreciate their works. One of the best screenings we had was for A Silent Voice where the audience was profoundly moved by the human drama on screen. Near all of us were in tears at the end. I think back on that screening and want to thank the folks at Kyoto Animation for making films and shows that help people connect with their shared humanity and I hope they can recover as best they can.
At the start of the week I posted about a series of special screenings orchestrated by the Tanabe Benkei Film Festival in Shinjuku. I then posted my review for the Nobuhiro Yamashita film Hard-Core, a tragi-comedy about outsiders and then a review for the super-excellent NDJC short film Last Judgementwhich plays in a free screening at the Japan Cuts festival of Japanese film in New York. I’ve been busy writing reviews for Japan Cuts. Three have been published on VCinema: The Kamagasaki Cauldron War, The Miracle of Crybaby Shottan, and the 2019 NDJC shorts. One of today’s Japan Cuts screenings is for the film Whole which I saw at the Osaka Asian Film Festival.
Synopsis: “This is a story about the world’s biggest secret. The secret that only she and I know.” The story centers around a boy and a girl choosing their own way to live through the twist and turns of fate in the world where the climate is losing its balance.
Synopsis: In a world where ghouls live amongst humans, a university student named Ken Kaneki (Masataka Kubota) finds himself caught between two worlds because he is half-ghoul and half-human. While he looks human, he must eat flesh. He shelters himself at Anteiku Cafe, a place run by friendly ghouls including Toka Kirishima (Maika Yamamoto). One day, a frightening new ghoul named Shu Tsukiyama (Shota Matsuda) appears at Anteiku Cafe. He is called the “Gourmet” and has plans for Kaneki.
Kengo Kora takes on a daring role that in this film directed by Mari Asato, someone who specialised in horror films like Bilocation prior to this. My favourite Kora roles are in The Drudgery Train and The Story of Yonosuke.
Synopsis:Naoto (Kengo Kora) was ignored by other people growing up. Whether at home or at school, he was ignored. The first person to call his name was a classmate named Chihiro (Kanako Nishikawa) and that sealed her fate as his dream girl. Naoto becomes obsessed with her and spends 11 years searching with nothing but her sweet memory during his school days as a reference until he finds her and discovers she is a different person. Naoto discovers how different by sneaking into her house and staying under her bed and tracking her every move…
An original CG short animation that was directed by Shinya Sugai and was shown at various festivals.
Synopsis:In an alternate world, humanity solves starvation by farming zombies. In Japan the corporation Flesh Inc. kicked the industry off in the Sixties using voodoo techniques imported from Africa, and has dominated the market by diversifying the zombie products it sells. Things go awry when three young workers get trapped inside a fully automated zombie farm with their supervisor and a horde of undead break free which forces the kids and their elder to work together…
Synopsis:Three teens experiencing loneliness find themselves connected by music posted online. There is lethargic junior high schooler Kou, whose father is a teacher at the same school. There is Tomoko whose love life is not going smoothly. Then there is Yuuka, who spends time with the strange men in the city when after school.
This is actually a pretty good film, one I reviewed as part of coverage for the New York Asian Film Festival. Here’s my review.
Synopsis: Mirai Takatsuki (Ayumu Mochizuki) had a life threatening disease as a child but he was saved thanks to public donations totalling five hundred million yen. This made him something of a celebrity and as he has grown up he has struggled to “repay” the life-saving moment given to him by the public. As an alienated high school student he decides to commit suicide and writes down his intentions on SNS which is how he receives a message from a stranger which states “if you want to die, you need to return the five hundred million yen first.” This challenge changes Mirai’s perspective on life.
The next two films are getting screened at Ikebukuro’s Cinema Rosa.
Synopsis:An offbeat youth zombie movie set in Nerima Ward, just north of Ikebukuro in Tokyo. The story centres on three game-loving college students who find themselves caught in the middle of a zombie pandemic when one of their number is out at a convenience store looking for the girl he likes…
Synopsis:A youth road movie depicting the journey of two men who cycle from Tokyo to the Sea of Japan, a distance of 260 kilometres. This work was produced as a graduation production of the Nihon University College of the Arts department by Kei Hirai, who shot it on 16 mm film. It is based on his own bicycle trips.
Synopsis:This 1987 film follows an outsider named Kumi (Kumiko Ota) who lives in a dormitory with a bohemian bunch of punk rockers and artists. When she discovers a patch of land and with an abandoned factory surrounded by flourishing flora, she moves there and begins to tend to the place in an effort to create paradise but things don’t end well…
The Locarno Film Festival runs from August 07th to the 17th and they have announced their selection of films. There are two Japanese films in the mix. Here they are!
Kiyoshi Kurosawa teams up with a great cast to make a movie which is a co-production between Japan and Uzbekistan to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations. Two of the leading actors have worked in his films, Atsuko Maeda being the lead in Seventh Code and Shota Sometani having a supporting role in Real.
Synopsis: Yoko (Atsuko Maeda) is a reporter for a TV variety program and her assignment is to find a mythical fish in a huge lake in Uzbekistan, a country that once flourished as the centre of the Silk Road. Things don’t quite go according to plan for Yoko and her crew and, one day, drawn by a mysterious voice, she departs from their company and loses herself in the wonders of the country…
The latter won the Prix du Jury in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival of that year. It stars Mariko Tsutsui who has been doing stellar work as seen in Jam (2018) and Antiporno (2016) and she returns here with a bonkers cast including Mikako Ichikawa (Rent-a-cat (2012)), Mitsuru Fukikoshi (Cold Fish (2011)) and two newbies both in NDJC 2019 films, Ren Sudo (Last Judgement) andMiyu Ogawa (Quiet Hide-and-Seek). This has awards potential as it lets Tsutsui off the leash and looks like it has decent direction but Fukada will have to present a reigned-in story!
Synopsis: Ichiko (Mariko Tsutsui) is a visiting nurse who has earned the trust of her patients. She has been helping Motoko (Mikako Ichikawa) study for the purpose of becoming a care worker. Ichiko is the only person with whom Motoko is open with. One day, Motoko’s younger sister Saki (Miyu Ogawa) disappears. A week later Saki returns hom unharmed, but the person arrested for her kidnapping is an unexpected person and Ichiko is suspected of being involved in the abduction. This causes Ichiko to collapse…
Kamagasaki is a slum-like part of Osaka’s Nishinari district which is notorious for having a high concentration of day labourers, homeless and a history of civil unrest, not to mention its proximity to the Tobita Shinchi red-light district. When I lived in Japan and moved from Tokyo to Nishinari I was given warnings and advice from friends. The way some people talked about the history of Kamagasaki made it sound anarchic and dangerous. By the time I got there things had become tamer thanks to gentrification driven by the boom in tourism and my experience was positive. Indeed, as soon as I was off the train a day worker with a sunny disposition struck up a conversation and offered to buy me a drink before my landlady rescued me from the surprise invitation and showed me around the district. They were the first of quite a few residents who took the time to talk to me and dispelled myths by telling me different stories of a poor but proud community who have had to fight for their human rights and dignity. The history and feel of Kamagasaki is strong and director Leo Sato has managed to bring it to life in his debut feature fiction film which creates a feel for the place.
The Kamagasaki Cauldron War (2019) tells a tale of ordinary people, down-and-outs, charity and church workers, political activists, police and outlaws meshing together in a warm-hearted ensemble piece. Their paths usually run alongside each other but crash together when a cheeky 12-year-old kid named Kantaro (Tsumugi Monko) steals the local yakuza gang’s treasured ceremonial cauldron and finds himself on the streets. It comes at a time when the head of the gang wants to pass control to his son, the affectless Tamao (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), and soon gangsters are prowling everywhere to get it back. Fortunately, Kantaro is taken under the Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.wing of an affable pickpocket named Nikichi (Yota Kawase) and a hardheaded sex-worker named Scarecrow Mei (Naomichi Ota). They both have history with Tamao and exploit the situation to make a little cash in schemes and misadventures but things get a lot more complicated when a property developer tries to force the town to change and starts causing trouble. A big battle will kick off in front of a giant cauldron, the symbol of Kamagasaki, which is used to feed the destitute and everybody will come together to face it!
Leo Sato based the film on the rakugo story Kamadoro (rice pot thieves) and it was informed by the director’s experiences filming his documentary Nagai Park Elegy (2009)¹ in which he lived in the titular park with a homeless community and recorded people’s opposition to their forced eviction at the hand’s of city workers. Here he tells a similar story, taking elements from real life such as police and yakuza colluding in the gentrification process, while placing Kamagasaki and its populace on the screen.
Shot over the course of five years on location and with locals involved for some social realism it lives and breathes the atmosphere of the place with busy boulevards leading to the upmarket Abeno’s Q Mall, the parks with tarpaulin tents, the quiet rabbit-warren of alleys near Tobita and standing bars full of day workers providing the backdrop. Sato uses many different and unique characters to give the widest view of life across the area possible and audiences get a deep dive into an often unseen, earthier side of Japan with a roughness which is under constant threat of erasure by local government and tourist development.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.For all of its realism it feels sort of like a fairytale due to its rakugo origins and its sprawling story full of boisterous colourful comical characters who are imbued more with charming mischievousness and rebelliousness than scary malevolence. They are all pulled together by Yota Kawase’s jolly presence and winning smile which he maintains in increasingly farcical situations as he goes from pick-pocket to reluctant revolutionary. The interactions between everyone are amusing, any violence more comical than serious, and the history of people and places is neatly brought out by dialogue rich in Osaka’s playful dialect as well as the shots of weathered faces of the non-professional actors.
Due to Sato’s choice to use 16mm film, the visuals have a heady atmosphere that make the movie look like a throwback to an Art Theatre Guild film from the ’80s in many ways, The lack of smartphones and other devices and the way people wear utilitarian fashion or cast-offs also make it hard to concretely locate it in the here and now and that gives the film a timeless quality. Perhaps it is because their battle for community rights is a timeless one.
This is a film that is unlike a lot of what is produced by Japanese cinema and features an area often avoided. It tells a unique and amusing story with warmth and truly captures the atmosphere of Kamagasaki, documenting a location and people which will be lost to gentrification and the passage of time, showing the positivity of an area blighted by a bad reputation and lionising the community’s spirit on film ensuring that it will last forever.
Considering Toshiaki Toyoda made his entry into Japanese films with low-budget punk titles about outsiders like Pornostar (1998) seeing him take on a film about shogi, or Japanese chess, is something of a surprise until you find out that he initially trained in shogi as a child. That, and the lead character of this biopic, the titular crybaby Shoji (Shottan) Segawa, was an outsider and trailblazer himself when he became a shogi professional well past the age when it is acceptable.
Based on a true story, we follow the life of Shoji Segawa (Ryuhei Matsuda) from childhood to the moment he breaks into the professional game. He exhibits a skill and passion for shogi as a young boy and with the support of his gentle father (Jun Kunimura) and an inspirational teacher (Takako Matsu) he begins the journey to go from amateur to pro. What this entails is foregoing high school and joining an academy where he plays and learns but there is a catch: he must hit the rank of fourth dan by the age of 26 to become professional and get paid to play. If he can’t, he must quit and go back into the real world and start his life over again.
And so the audience becomes aware of a clock ticking as we see Shoji play an increasingly dwindling number of games and failing. Despite his passion he finds he doesn’t quite have the drive to dominate the board and all the while his peers progress or drop out while some important figures in his life pass away to the next life altogether.
During this period of play, many audience members will recognise the patterns of procrastination and emotional displacement Shoji displays as time draws to an end and when he eventually misses his moment to shine and finds his time might be over it proves to be no shock but a disappointment. After the bitter pronouncements of, “Why didn’t I try harder? I had all the time in the world” the film charts his comeback, much of it orchestrated in the face of opposition from the Shogi Federation who resent Shoji trying to break into the game from outside of the structure of ranked battles in academies and so begins the truly inspirational battle on and off the board.
Throughout the film Toshiaki Toyoda’s direction is superlative when it comes to translating the drama on and around the shogi board to the screen as he keeps the camera tracking across the pieces and players, lacing around onlookers in the arena and cutting to people across the nation as they watch via television, often using close-ups on faces and bodies to deliver the psychological stress on everyone invested in the game as an insistent rock guitar plays out its driving rhythm on the soundtrack all of which will sweep along people watching the film.
The drama in Shoji’s wider life proves to be quite affecting as we come to know him and the world he inhabits and the film becomes just as much about the people around Shoji and the passion and care they invest in him and the game. There are countless examples like best friend and fellow shogi fan Yuya played by Yojiro Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Endo, the old master who regrets coming to the game too late as played by Issey Ogata, the quietly cocky pro played by Shota Sometani to the influential father and teacher who encouraged Shoji and gave him the positive affirmation he needed to pursue his passion. While Matsuda doesn’t quite display the dramatic chops to do the tearful scenes, his portrayal of a good-natured character is charming enough to relate his passion for the game and acts as the stable centre for the film’s supporting characters to orbit as well as someone audiences will root for as we wait for that miracle to happen…
The cast list is filled with major actors appearing in minor roles, some of whom like Ryuhei Matsuda and Kiyohiko Shibukawa have appeared in Toshiaki’s earlier films like Blue Spring (2002), and everyone acquits themselves perfectly to create a chorus of voices urging Shoji to push himself towards his dream in a tearjerker of an emotional climax. The ending is a fine moment of release and the overall message of the film, and Shoji’s example, is that pursuing a passion leads to happiness. It’s a healing message in a way as it shows perseverance is a skill and, like the teacher who encouraged Shoji to pursue his love, it will urge audiences to keep going.
Whether you know the game of shogi or not, whether you know about the career of Shoji Segawa or not, the film tells a universal story and makes all the right moves to make the audience care and the ending is a checkmate when it comes to uplifting content.
We’ll start the post with some sad news: Dutch actor Rutger Hauer has died. I came to know of his work through his roles in Blade Runner and The Hitcher when I was a teen and I can quote lines from both movies. It is as Roy Batty that I’ll always remember him as he gave his replicant character a fierce humanity and a black sense of humour and played him so hard he ended up being more human than the humans.
A week has passed since the deadly fire at Kyoto Animation and I’m trying to arrange a special screening of some kind for the anime fest I work for to pay tribute to the studio and those harmed on that awful day. I’ve also donated to one of the funds set up to help Kyoto Animation heal after the disaster – here are two links, one to Anime News Network and a report on a way to do direct bank transfers to Kyoto Animation and another to Sentai’s GoFundMe campaign.
Festival coverage will continue for both Japan Cuts and the New York Asian Film Festival and that will take me into the autumn festival season. Expect a post about Venice, and the Open City Documentary Festival rather soonish.
Satoshi Tsumabuki is a great actor, just see his roles in The World of Kanako, Gukoroku and Rage to understand. He’s in Taiwan with Etsushi Toyokawa, another fine actor, and the two play hitmen on a roadtrip. The project was announced at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and is finally released.
Synopsis:The story follows two Japanese hitmen, Makino (Tsumabuki) and Shima (Toyokawa), who are in exile in Taiwan. Makino know’s Shima’s past for some reason and secrets emerge when they travel together.
The latter won the Prix du Jury in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival of that year. It stars Mariko Tsutsui who has been doing stellar work as seen in Jam (2018) and Antiporno (2016) and she returns here with a bonkers cast including Mikako Ichikawa (Rent-a-cat (2012)), Mitsuru Fukikoshi (Cold Fish (2011)) and two newbies both in NDJC 2019 films, Ren Sudo (Last Judgement) andMiyu Ogawa (Quiet Hide-and-Seek). This has awards potential as it lets Tsutsui off the leash and looks like it has decent direction but Fukada will have to present a reigned-in story! This plays at Locarno next month.
Synopsis: Ichiko (Mariko Tsutsui) is a visiting nurse who has earned the trust of her patients. She has been helping Motoko (Mikako Ichikawa) study for the purpose of becoming a care worker. Ichiko is the only person with whom Motoko is open with. One day, Motoko’s younger sister Saki (Miyu Ogawa) disappears. A week later Saki returns home unharmed, but the person arrested for her kidnapping is an unexpected person and Ichiko is suspected of being involved in the abduction. This causes Ichiko to collapse…
This war film stars Masaki Suda, a good actor who typically portrays rough characters – Pink and Gray, The Light Shines Only There. He plays a mathematical genius in this war film directed by Takashi Yamazaki, someone who does big-budget special effects stories Destiny: A Tale of Kamakura as well as nostalgia inducing tales like The Eternal Zero. Other actors include Tasuku Emoto (Dynamite Graffiti, And Your Bird Can Sing) and Jun Kunimura (Vital), Tsurube Shofukutei (Dear Doctor).
Synopsis:It is the 1930’s and a confrontation between Japan and the West is brewing. The top brass of the Imperial Japanese Navy set out to build the world’s biggest battleship, Yamato, in order to make a statement about its power. However, Rear Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is opposed to that plan and discovers discrepancies over the cost in building the battleship so he hires Tadashi Kai (Masaki Suda), a genius mathematician, to investigate further…
Synopsis:65 million years ago, the knights of the Ryusoul Tribe battled the Druidon Tribe who sought to rule Earth but that all came to an end thanks to a meteor which wiped out the dinosaurs. The two sides fled into space but the Ryusoul tribe watched over Earth ready to defend it from the Druidon should they ever return. Which they did and now the Ryusoulgers, battle them. In the movie, one Ryusoulger, Kou, slips back 65 million years ago in time to the age of the dinosaurs and meets the Ryusoul ancestor Valma and his daughter Juno, and discovers the secrets of the birth of the Ryusoulgers.
Synopsis: “Kamen Rider Giou”, Sougo Tokiwa, slips back in time to 1575, the Sengoku Period, and meets Nobunaga Oda, as he searches for a way to save Kamen Rider Drive from danger. He meets Quartzers, a group of “Time Wardens”.
Synopsis mostly adapted from IMDB: “I want to live my life being me!”-A pure love story which pictures the world of LGBT. Kohei, a former competitive swimmer, lives an ordinary life with his wife and high school daughter, but one day, his wife suddenly asks him for a divorce. He then has a fateful encounter with a beautiful boy in Shinjuku’s 2-chome district. The boy’s name is Yutaka and he dreams of becoming an animator while working as an online chat boy but he has heartache of his own because he is struggling to tell his father that he is gay. Both Kohei and Yutaka seek solace in each other, become attracted to each other and have sex. Then, the next day they hurt each other. Through these emotional ups and downs, their relationship grows deeper and deeper. But . . .
Synopsis:A film shot in monochrome shows the adventures of two children affected by the disaster in Fukushima in Kanagawa Prefecture during the summer. The kids are sent by a glassworker named Michiru to look for a blue bird and they have the cryptic clue, “A blue bird lives in a smile.” The kids go about town and discover more about it and the resident.
A Chinese-Japanese co-production featuring talents from both nations. No trailer, however,
Synopsis:About 2300 years ago, Chinese culture was introduced to Yayoi period Japan. This drama plays out the adventure that descendants of the people who brought that culture to Japan, specifically, a university student named Shoko who learns more about her ancestors and the Emperor of China’s search for an elixir that promised immortality.
Synopsis:A documentary by Daisuke O-oka that looks into the life of Masako, a model who passed away at the age of 50 after a battle with a rare form of cancer in 2015. To get to know her, O-oka interviews those who worked with her and since Masako debuted as a model at the age of 19 and worked as an actress in movies such as “Ring”, there are many personalities like Naoto Takenaka and Hideo Nakata. Through talking to them and exploring archive material, a picture of Masako as a model, actress and more begins to emerge.
This short film played at the Kanazawa Film Festival 2017 and went on to screen at other fests where it won numerous awards, including the 18th TAMA NEW WAVE Competition Special Award.
Synopsis: The film examines bullying via the story of a schoolboy who wears a mask to school because of a deformation of the mouth. He and his parents desire the issue be corrected but he has to be 18 for that sort of surgery so his daily life is sometimes plagued by ostracisation over being different.
The next two films play at the “New Director Special vol. 4” in Ikebukuro’s Cinema Rosa in Tokyo. They have been screening indie films over the last couple of weeks and these two are the latest.
Kisu wa inochigake!
キスは命がけ！「Kisu wa inochigake!」
Release Date: June 27th, 2019
Duration: 40 mins.
Director:Tatsuya Goto
Writer:Tatsuya Goto(Screenplay),
Starring:Keisuke Aku, Sara Shida, Misato Morita, Rena Shirakawa, Yukako Yabe,
Synopsis:It must be great being a handsome high school student. Think of all the girls (and boys, if you’re that way inclined) you’re surrounded by. For Takuya, he gets to live the dream and finds himself with being confessed to by girls who have fallen for him on a daily basis. Alas, the dream is really a nightmare because he has a “kiss allergy” that means he will die when kissed. This strange and rather unfair affliction provokes a conflict in the boy because he is really attracted to high school girl Masami. He wants to kiss her but does not want to die…
Yakusoku no Jikan
約束の時間「Yakusoku no Jikan」
Release Date: June 27th, 2019
Duration: 48 mins.
Director:TatsuyaGoto
Writer:TatsuyaGoto(Screenplay),
Starring: An Ogawa, First Summer Uika, Nana Owada, Momoko Takeuchi, Tomoki Kimura, Manabu Kishi, Shinji Rokaku,
Synopsis: A comedy drama depicting in a clever storyline the fuss that arouses from the fact that three pairs of men and women with the same name accidentally meet the wrong people at the same cafe. Junpei Sato, a father will meet his daughter Kyoko for the first time in 15 years. Yusaku Sato has arranged to meet Kyoko through a sugar daddy site for the first time. Kengo Sato, a scout who is meeting with girl, Kyoko, who wants to be an idol. The meeting mix-ups happen and the conversations unfold with multiple misunderstandings…
Synopsis:A romantic comedy based on a manga of the same name unfolds at Otome High School where a nerdy teacher named Arahiko Tairaku finds himself cohabiting with a sexy student named Aya. This is potentially illegal on so many levels but she is also the daughter of a yakuza… This is the fifth volume of the series and Arahiko has managed to get the woman he loves, fellow teacher Miss Mayu, to go on a date with him but this upsets Aya…
Synopsis:A romantic comedy based on a manga of the same name unfolds at Otome High School where a nerdy teacher named Arahiko Tairaku finds himself cohabiting with a sexy student named Aya. This is potentially illegal on so many levels but she is also the daughter of a yakuza… This is the sixth volume of the series and it is a year until Aya graduates and she still likes Arahiko but he has plans to marry fellow teacher Miss Mayu. Aya also faces studying abroad.
Synopsis:Actor Shigeo Kato, who has appeared in numerous films such as Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” and “The Seven Samurai” and Shiro Honda’s “Godzilla”, made a movie at the age of 70 in 2018. He plays a 93-year-old fisherman in Kamakura who is also a widower. He has a daughter, Tomoko, who works in Tokyo, who visits him a couple of times a month, but he lives alone. As he gets older, he gets weaker and lonelier but one summer day, a young woman Yuki who is aiming to be a photographer, talks kindly to him. Her late grandfather was a fisherman and so there is a connection which makes her visit him and that makes that particular summer they meet special.
If you travel to Kyoto then it is recommended you try travelling from scenic Arashiyama to the bustling city centre by the Randen trams. They cut through many areas and they prove to be the perfect setting for three intersecting stories in a film.
Randen: The Comings and Goings on a Kyoto Tram (review) features a writer named Eisei Hiraoka (Arata Iura) has travelled from Kamakura to Kyoto to research supernatural stories but, instead, relives memories of time spent in Kyoto with his wife; Kako Ogura (Ayaka Onishi), a shy local woman helps an actor from Tokyo named Fu Yoshida (Hiroto Kanai) practice speaking with Kyoto dialect; Nanten Kitakado (Tamaki Kubose), a high school girl from Aomori, who falls for a local train otaku (Kenta Ishida).
Quite unlike many other films screened in 2019, Randen revels in creating a Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.magical atmosphere of heightened romance and folktales that could only take place in Kyoto. It was the opening film of the 2019 edition of the Osaka Asian Film Festival and it will play on the final day of Japan Cuts 2019 in New York. I had the chance to interview the director of the film, Takuji Suzuki, at Osaka and he revealed how the film was a put together with love and care by his team which included Kyoto University film students and local people living along the Randen line.
Jason: How did you join the project?
Suzuki: One of the film’s producers, [Nobuyoshi] Nishida-san, brought it up first. He lives near the randen station Omuro Ninnnaji. There is Goju-no tou (a five-storied pagoda) in the area. He asked me to make a film about randen in the style of a love story. I wasn’t living in Kyoto at that time but he might have heard that I teach in the city.
J: Crowdfunding was involved. Could you talk about that?
S: First, I became an associate professor at a university and was making commercial films as a university project with a team called “Kitashirakawa-ha”. This enabled me to use some of the budget from the university project for the making of this film. I then thought I could raise money through crowdfunding and also use crowdfunding as an advertising tool to bring people together while shooting the film in Kyoto. For example, I needed lots of extras for passengers on the trams.
J: So, it was deliberate tool to help make this a “community film”?
S: In terms of that, I think that the best way of producing film is to make the people from the community who are involved discover pleasure from taking part in it and give them something to take back home, so they are not just being used as a tool. I do not consider film-making as a business.This is my fundamental ideology for making films. However, since this film was not made with my own money, I also have responsibility as a producer to recoup the money I had spent on it.
J: There are various scenes where people from the community are watching home videos. Are they actual Kyotoites? Those were things taken from real families?
S: Some are family films with their precious memories and I also borrowed archives kept by people who reside in the local area used by Randen.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
J: How did Keifuku Randen tram company get involved?
S: Keifuku Randen company never asked us to make a film. It was like our one-sided love for Randen. To start with, they were dubious about us – why we wanted to make a film about the trams. That’s why we had had no tie-up or full co-operation with them, we just filmed without causing disruption to their timetable and passengers.
However, after we made a request for them to operate a specific tram at specific time on a specific day, the company developed an understanding that we were working seriously on making the film and started to support us. But we never stopped any trams.
There was only once, for a scene in the fantasy. We were allowed to shoot inside a tram for 2 hours while it was stationed at a platform after finishing its operation for the day. We could only manage to shoot using a basic cutback/cutaway though. We also filmed scenes inside an actual running tram that we had paid for. We shot the scenes while the tram was operating between its departure and final station.
J: When you first started shooting without the help of the tram company, was it hard to get scenes perfect? Because you had to have a specific tram arrive at specific time?
S: Yes, it was hard. I hadn’t experienced moving a train tofit in with shooting and there was nothing for me to compare it with… It was rather difficult to make a decision, if we should wait for the next tram or just compromise and use what we shot, because it took an hour for the same tram to come back to the place where we were. However, actually, everyone’s concentration was rather high, so I think I could draw advantages from the circumstance.
I think we might be able to approach an essential idea that can be attributed to the film better when we can’t control the situation. It would be better for film-making when we say “I can’t control everything”. There might be a future for films only if we have restricted situations.
J: It’s like fate.
S: Oh Certainly! Fate is a very important theme of this film. I don’t want to use the word but actually it is an important keyword. I have just thought right now that it was actually unexciting as we already knew which tram would come next. I mean, Randen operates trams with different colours but we knew beforehand what colour tram would come next as we had requested information the day before. But, with hindsight, it might have been better shooting without knowing it.
J: Your script features many different scenes that segue between reality and dream. How difficult was it to write?
S: Maybe I didn’t separate them like, “is this reality or isn’t it?” in my head while I was writing the script. But I thought, from my experience, it would be risky if we shoot the film with a script written only from my point of view. So I delegated to [Hiroshi] Asari-san, who joined our team as a chief assistant director, to amend the final draft of the script.
It was not quite rewriting… it was something like adding lines or perhaps translation. He understood well what I wanted to do and translated it on my behalf. He would intercede like, “It would be easier to convey what you want to say to others if there were some additional lines like these here”.
J: The most fantastical elements are the Tanuki and Kitsune. Is that a real legend?
S:The Kitsune and Tanuki legend was made up. If you understand it as demons in Japanese folklore, that’s fine. I didn’t want to depict the Kitsune and Tanuki only within a tradition or typical Kyoto way. I wanted to depict them in a broader way.
There was a great author called Kenji Miyazawa who wrote a story about trains for children. Have you heard “Night on the Galactic Railroad”? And also a novelist, Taruho Inagaki, who spent his later life in Fushimi in Kyoto. What they wrote connects to music by Morio Agata [Randen’s composer]. They wrote about a unique sense somewhere between nostalgia and future. The fantasy I have drawn from by including the Kitsune & Tanuki might be closer to modernism although it differs from retro-future.
My definition of fantasy is not something beyond a door or filter, thImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.ere is no switch between reality and fantasy. For example, you might have a partner and might be troubled with her/him. You could be walking whilst thinking about it, then look up at the sky. Suddenly your reality could have turned into something different.
For example, films by Theo Angelopoulos, the Greek director, are often shot in extremely long cuts. In his films, some strange thing would happen within one cut, a decade might suddenly fly by within one cut. I think his technique could connote all methods of film-making. Things we see now are already only an illusion.
Maybe I want to make something fuzzy. I want to make films like a rare animal or things without clear definitions but it might be very risky as I don’t know how much an audience would understand it.
J: It is really entertaining. It’s like entering a dream. My final question, what is your memory of Randen?
S: In the film, you will see a station called Katabira no Tsuji, where there is the Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.junction between the mainline and Kitano line. When I was a university student, a time when Kyoto was still an unfamiliar place for me, I heard a song titled “Waiting for an Alien at Katabira no Tsuji”. It was composed in the 80s’ by Morio Agata who did the soundtrack for “Randen”. It was the first time for me to hear the name of the station and I didn’t even know it was one of the stations visited by the Randen trams but with this film, I could make the connection between them.
In the film, I used a real legend (link to the legend), not a made up one, about Katabira no Tsuji. The name Katabira no Tsuji was derived from the legend. I have borrowed this tale in the film. The image of the legend was overlapped with the scene at the subway of the station.
I feel now as if my mind has been left sleeping there (in the subway in Katabira no Tsuji). That place is a key part of the film, I think the heart of “Randen” could be there. This long journey of making the film had started from the song. It was the song and the legend about Katabira no Tsuji that kept encouraging me to make this film. I have tactfully merged a scene that indicates the legend into the film.
I think to make a film in a particular town means to make a film of the area. My desire to get closer to the heart of the area, which is not visible, would be an important method/step to capture the area itself. The purpose of the film was to shoot the area and to search for the legend was one of the steps.
Naomi Kawase¹ (website) is in London in September for the Open City Documentary Festival 2019 where she will take part in three screenings and will introduce a selection of her works and take part in a Q&A and extended talk. Called, “Naomi Kawase: In Focus”, this particular festival strand, organised with the help of the Japan Foundation, is a unique opportunity to see some of the early films that helped make Naomi Kawase a major presence in world cinema as these self-documentaries show her nascent skull which developed while she recorded some of the most intimate details of her life as she searched for her identity on screen. Most prominent amongst the films is the influence of her adoptive mother, Uno Kawase, which is a bond that is put on screen in a moving set of films which have been highly lauded.
Here are the details. Just click on the titles to access the festival page and booking information:
Synopsis:A documentary about Kawase’s search for her father, the man who left her when she was a child and never attempted to make contact. Armed with an 8mm camera and a set of photographs of people and places from her parent’s past, Kawase journeys into nostalgia and disappointment and…
Synopsis: Nearly a decade on after finding her father on “8 mm film” she has records her reaction to his death and the impact is keenly felt on film as Naomi draws on her original search in the film “Embracing”, the strength of her adoptive parents throughout her life and possibilities of creating another identity in her career as a filmmaker.
The “Grandmother Trilogy” shows Uno Kawase, the woman who helped raise Naomi in intimate home movie footage where we further see the roots of one of contemporary cinemas most unique voices and how she has always had a knack for capturing intimacy.
Synopsis:An experimental collage of intimate moments weaving together starkly different images such as Uno gardening, burning rubbish and Naomi larking about around her…
Synopsis: Katatsumori is a film about Kawase’s grandmother, the woman who stepped in, with the grandfather, to be a foster parent. Gardening is featured heavily as Uno shows off her skills but what becomes apparent as Kawase uses the camera is their close relationship. In a surprising move, the older lady gets in on the act as they connect through cinema and show us the bond they share…
Dust・Chiri
天見たけ「Ten, mitake」
Release Date: 2012
Duration: 45 mins.
Director: Naomi Kawase
Writer: N/A
Starring: Naomi Kawase, Uno Kawase, Mitsuki Kawase
Synopsis: Naomi Kawase was born into a world where her parents, and most of her family were absent but Uno Kawase and her husband stepped in to raise their grand-daughter. Now, in this film, Uno is at the end of her life and Naomi is there to document her last days on Earth, thus immortalising her.
Synopsis: This film turns all of the previous films on their head and shows us a more complicated picture of the relationship between Naomi and Uno Kawase. Naomi uses the first half of the film to ruminate on death by documenting Uno’s daily life as she nears death with each moment and the grief builds as she captures awkward and challenging moments. Then the film moves into the more hopeful realm of life as Naomi gives birth to her child Mitsuki in another challenging sequence as she refuses to turn the camera away from that moment.
¹I have only reviewed fiction features made by Naomi Kawase. Here are the reviews (indulge me):
