Editing
Witness a bizarre job interview and a dotty grandma in these five short surreal stories revolving around legendary Japanese department store Parco.
Nursing home "Yuyoso". Many lonely old people live there, including botanist Taro Makiso, a physicist, an actor, a bar mom, and a chef. Maki has spent most of his life studying botany, and has lived without regard for entertainment, drinking, women, or everything else in the world. Then came my 80th birthday. He and a young staff member go digging for wild yam and find a mysterious golden flower. It was the flower of immortality, the "Golden Flower", which was said to bloom beside the Himalayan Virgin, which he had been looking for for many years. From that day onwards, fragments of memories from his youth, which he had intentionally sealed off in order to immerse himself in botany, surged into Maki in a whirlpool.
Early summer, Keiichi had just moved to a remote mountain village. As he becomes close friends with a group of girls, he was enjoying his life in the village. However when he starts to become suspicious that his friends may be deeply involved in successive murders that occur every summer, the situation around Keiichi gradually starts to turn into something more sinister.
Asuka is an aspiring model who moves to Tokyo to pursue her career. She moves into a small apartment with a friend of a friend, Kasumi. A bizarre murder occurs in the hotel across the street. The body was mutilated and repositioned into a lurid work of art. After this, a string of murders start happening all around the two girls, as if some crazed serial killer was following them. At the scene of each crime, the perpetrator leaves a black lip print, and is subsequently dubbed "The Black Kiss."
An action film depicting the friendship and betrayal of a group of bad girls. A yakuza movie with popular idols.
Elementary school alumnus are held captive in a school and forced to play a fatal game "Jinroh Game."
A documentary that pursues the traces of a woman in Yokohama who stood at a street corner as a prostitute for 50 years after the war. An old woman, dressed in an aristocratic dress with her face made up white, quietly stands at a street corner. Known as a beautiful prostitute, her sophisticated behavior, as the years rolled by, became part of the local scenery. Never revealing her real name or her age, the woman preserved her lifestyle as a prostitute. People call her "Yokohama Mary". In winter 1995, Mary disappeared from the street. Rumors spread like an urban legend. There were some people who kept a kind watch for her. One such person is a chanson singer, Nagato Ganjiro, who has very little time left to live because of his illness. As Nagato recalls his memories of Mary, his desire to sing in front of her once more grows.
A baby, John, who was abandoned in the church with a horse-headed koto on his side. His grandfather was once a Morin Khuur player and died in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The brilliantly colored images have an avant-garde charm while hiding the sadness of the war, and will grab the viewer's heart.
No description available.
The story of Henri Mitowa, a 93-year old Japanese monk, who wants to make a movie based on his own life.
Recently appointed dean at a film school, Kimuro Hajime develops a special concern for one of his students, Daisuke. The brash, headstrong young man is fixated on with the Second World War. He feels a sense of frustration at the irrational sacrifice of young people's lives during the war six decades earlier. Daisuke finds that he can vent his frustrations to Kimuro, who experienced the war firsthand. Kimuro's wife, Emiko, is also troubled by memories of the war. She lost a loved one in the war and has never gotten over it. And Kimuro himself also has something from the past that he has yet to face. He believes that the burden of his unresolved past will eventually be the death of him. When Daisuke's neurosis causes him to quit school, life changes for all three of them.
In the summer of 1998, the filmmaker went home to Takasaki to film the birth of his brother and sister-in-law's child. Days go by and the child is still to be born. With time on his hands and no one to talk to, the filmmaker finds the phone number for a telephone date club, and calls up with an earnest de- sire: I'd like to talk to a girl. While following the conventions of film-diary form, at some point the filmmaker falls into a times pace tunnel of false memory.
Documentary about Japanese musician Keiji Haino. Includes clips of live performances and extracts from dozens of hours of interviews with Haino and members of Fushitsusha.
A young man is on an inner journey as he searches for meaning in love, eroticism and marriage. He boards a train, and all the clocks are mirrored from then on, as if looking at them from the inside. He travels to a homey village, meets a potential fiancée, then a more sensuous and mysterious stripper.
I was 20 years old when I just started living on my own. I was 20 years old when I first started living on my own, and all sorts of "what if I become ________" thoughts came into my head. The "too small" me, who used to murmur childish fantasies like "What if that cloud falls down" or "What if I don't know where I live?
Eri Manaka lives alone in the big city. She writes a romantic novel on impulse and is startled when it gets rave reviews and makes her a literary celebrity. But doubts soon kick in, and Eri begins work on an anti-romantic sequel, in which her heroine Rie goes through the torments of the damned.
Set in Hakodate in the summer, this is a retro-inspired coming-of-age drama about a love triangle between a sister and brother who are like lovers and a young man.
A musical film by Takeo Kimura, renowned as one of Japan's foremost art directors, known for his work on Seijun Suzuki’s films. The story unfolds through a chain of abstract imagery and metaphors. An old queen is trapped within the rocks, alongside a woman in black and a white angel, who, like a young girl, governs the red thread of fate. Is the woman in black the queen’s alter ego, her daughter, or her past self? She finds herself drawn to a man playing the violin in a café.
Reiko is a sex robot programmed to accumulate sexual experience. She goes through seven body types to experiences a variety of couplings. She returns to the company to download her accumulated info and escape from their control.
