Directing
The best must be the freshest. The best sake also follows the same principle to brew in which it needs the best and freshest raw materials, and also the freshest virgin to make it? Visiting one of a Japanese pub that seems to offer the best warm sake, Mononobe tries to follow the steps to reproduce the same flavor. However, he suddenly found out that those flavors are actually a combination of sake, sweat, and other bodily secretions of a virgin. As his only daughter is not a virgin anymore, the only way to make the best sake without a pure virgin is...
A Kafkaesque porno like "Silence of the Lambs"
When three older men buy a 17-year-old schoolgirl named Chikako for a year's-worth of sexual services -- her motivation, aside from money, is never explained -- the relationships among the men (whom she calls A. B and C) keep shifting in ways that redefine power and sex.
A young woman works as a waitress in a diner. Her relationship with her boyfriend is unfulfilling and to further complicate things she is obsessed with a large hemangioma, or benign vascular tumor, on her hip (one that we actually never see). One day after she encounters a mysterious man wearing a hood and playing a clarinet she discover a small shack built out of cardboard. She crawls into it and suddenly we are transported to this young woman's interior world, a place where she meets her own doppelgänger in the form of a large doll who bears the same birthmark on her hip.
TheForbidden pure love story, based on the original work of Junichi Watanabe. Chitani Moriya is an ordinary 25-year-old office worker who is driven by a marriage desire.
A sea voyage steered in a “direction without direction.” A single-screen version of a video performance piece created and exhibited during the director’s residency at Paris’s Le Cube in spring of 2020, on the eve of worldwide COVID-19 lockdowns.
For the film’s 10th anniversary, experimental filmmaker Kei Shichiri (DUBHOUSE, JAPAN CUTS 2015) presents an all-new sound and image remastering of his tour de force film (formerly translated as Before the Day Breaks). Based on a manga by Naoki Yamamoto, the film follows Aochi, who sleeps and sleeps but never feels like she has slept enough. Shichiri, who explores the limits of sound and image in his diverse body of work, presents a highly evocative dramatic film in which humans barely appear on screen. The story is told through voiceover, sound and visions of dreams and landscapes. Over the years, the film has gained fans, including contemporary auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who compared the film to those by Jean-Luc Godard. -JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film
A female prison guard arrives to conduct a psychiatric evaluation of an 18-year-old female inmate. But what awaits her? Lesbianism, S&M, rape, gang rape... An erotic film depicting forbidden desires and passions unfolding within a women's prison.
Gōzō Yoshimasu is one of Japan’s leading poets, still prolific into his ninth decade. This film documents his 2019 performance of Se (‘back’), a live poetry reading set against accompaniment from avant-garde rock group Kukan Gendai. Blindfolded and wearing a facemask, Yoshimasu plays audio recordings, growls and rasps his way through a rendition of a poem, and channels every ounce of his energy into drawing, using a pane of glass as his canvas. Kukan Gendai sculpt shapes of sound in response: an entire universe thrown into sharp relief by an uncompromising contest between voice and music.
A dance film produced in collaboration with renowned dance and choreographer Ikuyo KURODA and commissioned by popular Japanese rock band Clammbon. Two versions were made, using different locations.
Mieko and Ena decide to co-write a novel together under a single pseudonym. But then Ena begins to act strangely, spending her nights obsessively stealing the ties of random drunk men she encounters. When Ena disappears, Mieko’s search for her friend leads her to Hidaka, an unassuming man who suits one of the ties in Ena’s collection. Soon the two of them stumble upon rumour of a district that doesn’t exist on any map…
The ghost of her young mother appears to a gray-haired cleaning lady and laments her daughter’s life of loneliness, having borne no children. However, the old woman refuses her mother. This work is based on the concept of re-creation in digital conversion, capturing the video stage play “ A Woman who cleans up” (performed at Drama-Kan Theatre in 2019) and capturing the noise / errors that occur during the conversion as acting or choreographs. Fukushiki Mugen-Noh by AI. The end of human beings.
A documentary that focuses on an installation called “Busshitsu Shiko 51: DUBHOUSE” (Experience in Material No.51: DUBHOUSE) by architect Ryoji SUZUKI at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 2010. Its original concept of capturing the darkness produced by architecture was dramatically altered by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11th, 2011. SHICHIRI begins by filming both the light and shadows produced by the works on display, and embeds SUZUKI’s drawings of the disaster-hit regions within them. Cinemas are architectural structures where darkness is inherent. Films that attempt to emerge from that darkness are a form of emitted light, and at the same time they could be seen as a type of prayer. This is a metafilm on the subject of light and darkness, as well as a response to a historical event.
A young man writes a novel about his forbidden love with his sister, who works overtime in the office on a holiday. Based on the manga of the same name by Naoki Yamamoto, and covering the manga's inspiration source, Juro Kara's "Anjuko's Shoes" and Ogai Mori's "Sansho Dayu".
A single-screen version of a multi-projection installation exhibited in Kyoto in 2016 and Nara the following year. The director’s statement released upon its premiere reads as follows: “Despite its continued pretense to represent the ‘correct’ view of things, the square framework through which we make sense of the world is already warped to the point of disfiguration. Where will we end up next?”
A young woman’s shadow appears in a library at night, where it happens upon the frozen figure of a young man. His romantic interest thus sparked, the figure’s heart becomes a light which floats about the space in playful pursuit of the woman’s shadow.
The second work made using the same soundtrack, the same recited text, as “Salome’s Daughter: Another Side (First Fruits)”. This time the center of gravity is shifted to the narrative, and the relationships between the mother, daughter and absent father are explored. But what are “mother,” “daughter,” and “father”? These labels of self endlessly waver in the spaces between the polyphonic monologues and the multiple layers of image and sound. Loss of the family is shown in silhouette. A dance using stage equipment is projected on a scrim. Images presented in silence in the previous work are fleshed out with synchronized sound, and the mysterious group Wangel are now in a talkie . This might be a dream that orphans saw when they were dancing.
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I am a cleaning woman. My hair has turned white, and the days simply pass by without meaning. Then, the ghost of my mother appears before me in her youthful form. She laments that her daughter never bore children and lives in solitude. But the daughter fiercely argues back… A performance of song and physical expression borrowing the form of mugen nō. When it repeats once again, human figures are no longer there. Strange box-like humans writhe and move, and the theater transforms into CGI…
When did film and music first encounter one another? In the beginning, film had no voice. Even so, he must have heard the sounds that emanated as he watched. It was late 19th Century Paris that gave birth to both the medium of film and the play “Salome” by Oscar Wilde. In this work, the peculiar connection between the two is articulated through the telling of their stories simultaneously but separately, one in sound and one in images. In the soundtrack (audio), twelve people bombard us with the text of “Salome” in raging billows of songs, chanting, and storytelling, while the video tells the personified history of film dispassionately, in titles.
