Fechina onnatachi: Hazukashii shitagi

Kyôko, a traumatized young Japanese girl, finds herself struggling with her self-confidence in her adult life. Growing up in a family without her mother and her sister, she constantly questions the rationale of sex and the notion of liberty in modern Japanese society.

A submissive hooker goes about her trade, suffering abuse at the hands of Japanese salarymen and Yakuza types. She's unhappy about her work, and is apparently trying to find some sort of appeasement for the fact that her lover has married.

Based on the factual case of a young man who broke into a nurses' home in Chicago, mutilating and killing several of the inmates, Wakamatsu's film is a precise, sad delineation of a particular aspect of masculine sexual consciousness.

A 21-year-old girl is released from prison, only to deal with the neighborhood gossip about her and family conflicts. She decides to save one million yen, move to where no one knows her and keep repeating the process.

Feeling awkward and isolated, an imaginative and strong-willed teenage girl runs away from home with an older punk rock drifter.

Rei is a college student in the midst of finding a job. She confesses her love to Mikio, a senior whom she admires. Mikio soon demands that she perform perverted acts.

A first-ever look at the realities of the professional “amateur” porn world and the steady stream of 18-to-19-year old girls entering into it.

Misaki Amemiya is an assistant inspector for the Metropolitan Police Department's Community Safety Bureau who becomes ensnared in a trap while investigating a mysterious illegal video website called "Babylon". Soon, she's bound and tortured along with Shizuko and an oversexed housewife named Ruri.

A disillusioned filmmaker has an encounter with a young woman who has a ritual of repeating "Tomorrow is my birthday" everyday. He tries to communicate with her through his video camera.

The seven short films making up GENIUS PARTY couldn’t be more diverse, linked only by a high standard of quality and inspiration. Atsuko Fukushima’s intro piece is a fantastic abstraction to soak up with the eyes. Masaaki Yuasa, of MIND GAME and CAT SOUP fame, brings his distinctive and deceptively simple graphic style and dream-state logic to the table with “Happy Machine,” his spin on a child’s earliest year. Shinji Kimura’s spookier “Deathtic 4,” meanwhile, seems to tap into the creepier corners of a child’s imagination and open up a toybox full of dark delights. Hideki Futamura’s “Limit Cycle” conjures up a vision of virtual reality, while Yuji Fukuyama’s "Doorbell" and "Baby Blue" by Shinichiro Watanabe use understated realism for very surreal purposes. And Shoji Kawamori, with “Shanghai Dragon,” takes the tropes and conventions of traditional anime out for very fun joyride.

An American journalist travels through 19th-century Japan to find the prostitute he fell in love with but instead learns of the physical and existential horror that befell her after he left.

After a messy breakup with her high school boyfriend, April strikes up an unexpected platonic friendship with his new girlfriend, Clara.

A documentary on the modeling industry's 'supply chain' between Siberia, Japan, and the U.S., told through the experiences of the scouts, agencies, and a 13-year-old model.

18 years after the mysterious death of her mother, Maya takes religious vows to find out what terrible things happened to her mother inside the Sacred Heart Convent. As soon as the door closes to the nunnery, the nuns start torturing her. She also has to deal with a lecherous archbishops and a lesbian mother superior.

A drama set in the American South, where a precocious, troubled girl finds a safe haven in the music and movement of Elvis Presley.

More interested in partying and flirting with young musicians than work, veteran rock journalist Ellie Klug has one last chance to prove her value to her magazine’s editor: a no-stone-unturned search to discover what really happened to long lost rock god, Matt Smith, who also happens to be her ex-boyfriend. Teaming up with an eccentric amateur documentary filmmaker, Ellie hits the road in search of answers.

When her rather explicit copy is rejected, magazine journalist Kate is asked by her editor to come up with an article on loving relationships instead, and to do so by the end of the day. This gets Kate thinking back over her own various experiences, and to wondering if she is in much of a position to write on the subject.

Go, Go, Second Time Virgin is the story of two damned and abused teenagers who meet and fall in mutant love on a Tokyo rooftop. Their only hope is to cement their love with an escape into oblivion.

In the aftermath of her tumultuous relationship with a charismatic and manipulative older man, Julie begins to untangle her fraught love for him in making her graduation film, sorting fact from his elaborately constructed fiction.

Bettie Page grew up in a conservative religious family in Tennessee and became a photo model sensation in 1950s New York. Bettie's legendary pin-up photos made her the target of a Senate investigation into pornography, and transformed her into an erotic icon who continues to enthrall fans to this day.