Moonlight Serenade
After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, a writer remembers travelling with his family to bury his brother after World War II.
Sharaku
A crippled kabuki player is taken into a strolling company of itinerant actors. An influential publisher notices his honest, bold drawings, and nurtures him despite persecution and betrayal. The film…
Ballad of Orin
A blind traveling musician is abused and oppressed wherever she goes, even as the modern world imposes change around her.
Himiko
The myth of the Sun Goddess who founded Japanese society is seen through the lens of a modern view of history.
Sapporo Winter Olympics
A documentary about the 1972 Winter Olympic Games in Sapporo, Japan.
Double Suicide
Successful and married with children, paper-mill owner Jihei knows better than to contradict the strict social and moral codes of 18th-century Japan. But when he meets the lovely courtesan Koharu,…
With Beauty and Sorrow
When the man who seduced the famous painter Otoko as a teenager–and then wrote a bestselling novel about it–reappears in her life, her pupil–and lesbian lover–hatches a plot to destroy…
Love New and Old
A woman brings her injured daughter to the hospital, only to realize that the doctor is the estranged father of her child.
Pale Flower
Muraki, a hardboiled Yakuza gangster, has just been released from prison after serving a sentence for murder. Revisiting his old gambling haunts, he meets Saeko, a striking young upper-class woman…
The Petrified Forest
Follows a young med student’s relationships with two women: a dangerous affair with a childhood friend and his mother’s struggle to rebuild their estranged relationship.
Captive’s Island
Seeking revenge against the guard who tormented him, a young man returns to the island where he was imprisoned in reform school. But his plans for vengeance are disturbed when…
Demon Pond
Outside of a small village in Japan, a mysterious pond is inhabited by mythic creatures. Their story is of revenge, tragedy, and the power of real love. A classical tale…
Tokyo Twilight
Two sisters find out the existence of their long-lost mother, but the younger cannot take the truth of being abandoned as a child.
Our Marriage
When two sisters fall in love with the same man, one must decide to look elsewhere.
A Flame at the Pier
Takashi Fujiki stars as a rebel in this drama about life on the Yokohama waterfront by New Wave director Masahiro Shinoda. The rebel works as an errand boy for a…
Youth in Fury
A reckless student contemplates terrorism in a prescient film that confirmed Shinoda as a fearless member of Shochiku’s iconoclastic New Wave. At the height of student protests, Shimojo (Shinichiro Mikami)…