Mostly seen on the gay pink film circuit at the time of its release, Akihiro Suzuki’s debut is an experimental foray into grief and memory, set against a hazy, blue city and now restored to its rightful place in the Japanese arthouse canon.
Nihilistic drifter Utamaro meets Giko, a female-presenting shoplifter and the couple soon find themselves on the lam. A newly rediscovered landmark of Japanese queer cinema, directed by Isao Fujisawa, former assistant to Hiroshi Teshigahara.
Carried by Harumi Inoue’s bold performance, Takashi Ishii's icy, allegorical Freeze Me places a heavier emphasis on the haunting effects of trauma than is customary from the rape-revenge genre.
As 21-year-old Kana's mood oscillates between high and lows, her relationships devolve into increasing chaos. Yoko Yamanaka's sophomore character study is a searingly honest examination of womanhood and mental health in contemporary Japan.
Yoko Yamanaka's debut, a story of teenage obsession and passion described as "a distant cousin of Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le métro” indebted to the DIY spirit of the Japanese self-produced film (jishu eiga).
Dancer-turned-filmmaker Nao Yoshigai makes her debut with this experimental documentary about one of Japan’s most secluded and magnificent areas: Shari, a small town on the north-east coast of Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido.
Unemployed in the wake of the pandemic, 26 year-old filmmaker Taku Aoyagi decides to try his luck in Tokyo as an Uber delivery rider. A thrilling, first-person perspective on the gig economy.
In this demented spin on the unwanted guest scenario, iconoclast Masashi Yamamoto (Robinson's Garden, What's Up Connection) invites you to an absurdist party, an unhinged matsuri, that never stops giving.
Sakura, an aspiring rapper who lives next to the American military base in Yamato, sees her routine disturbed by the arrival of Rei, a Japanese-American relative. Daisuke Miyazaki's sophomore feature: an ode to his hometown of Yamato.
Two fans of cult 70s band Exne Kedy and the Poltergeists fall in and out of love around their shared passion, in this colorful, rock-inflected coming-of-age tale from Daisuke Miyazaki inspired by the music and lore of Kensuke Ide's musical universe.
A Tokyo greengrocer risks it all to help a group of Chinese exchange students. A neglected masterpiece from director Nobuhiko Obayashi (House) that chronicles the end of a decade marked by the Japanese economic bubble and the brutal close of possibility in China.
A Hong Kong teenager wins a trip to Japan and unleashes a chaotic chain of events (full of hackers! thieves! UFOs!) in Masashi Yamamoto's Hong Kong-Japan coproduction, an unhinged globalization mini-epic.
A bohemian drug-dealer discovers an abandoned building on the outskirts of Tokyo. Lensed by Tom DiCillo on the heels of Stranger Than Paradise and Variety, Masashi Yamamoto's second feature is his defining anticapitalist, punk statement.
4-year-old office worker Yoshika daydreams about former high school crush Ichi until Ni, a clumsy colleague, bursts her fabulous bubble. Akiko Ohku’s fan-favorite subversion of the romantic comedy.
Ai wakes from a night out to find footage of a sexual encounter on a porn share site. Without recourse, she resorts to a strange solution. Daisuke Miyazaki unveils a paranoid thriller set on the backstreets of Osaka, captured here in striking monochrome.
Carefree Takashi would rather play the bongo, but a Tokyo family is determined to open a countryside café in his home. Miike meets Ozu in Tadashi Nagayama's eccentric pastoral comedy examining Japan’s growing urban-rural divide.
