Acting
A first-hand account of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police beat following Jake Adelstein, an American journalist who embeds himself into the Tokyo Vice police squad to reveal corruption. Based on Jake Adelstein’s non-fiction book of the same name.
In a near-future Japanese city bracing for a devastating earthquake, a group of teenage friends navigate personal struggles and fractured bonds amid rising tension.
The daily grind of the elderly cleaner of a Japanese bathhouse is disrupted when a young man attempts suicide.
In Ishinomaki, Miyagi, a mother and child wander around the city looking for each other.
A short film that delves into the intricacies of gay dating in Japan. Aoki, a solitary Japanese gay man, spends a night by himself in a hotel, seeking companionship through a gay dating app. His interactions with Mori leave him feeling hollow and dissatisfied, leading him to ponder the difficulties of discovering love and acceptance as a gay man in Japan. This poignant film explores the human condition and the universal longing for love, acceptance, and connection.
Didi, a French traveler, visits a rural town and explores the mountains by bicycle. At a remote shrine, she meets a suspicious young man named Chance, dressed as a farmer, but her bicycle gets a flat tire and she ends up spending the night in an old house. She then meets Emi, a woman who works at a bakery in town, and they hit it off, and the two of them ride through the mountains together. Before long, the end of summer arrives.
Shimada, a former Self-Defense Force member, suffers from severe PTSD following the loss of a comrade in a firefight in war-torn South Sudan, a tragedy covered up by the government. Shining a light into Shimada's solitary life in illegal arms manufacturing is a job as an apprentice at a traditional Japanese fireworks factory. There he begins crafting fireworks alongside the master artisan and fellow craftsmen who embrace fireworks that illuminate people's peaceful lives. Yet, parallel to Shimada's journey, his comrades-in-arms with unresolved feelings team up on radical acts to expose the government's cover-up, escalating tensions and pulling Shimada back into the darkness he thought he'd left behind.
In Tokyo, an unfulfilled romantic encounter and sudden disappearance leave Seiji struggling to make sense of what never happened and what might have been.
Near-future Tokyo. Kou, through the help of his high school best friend, finds a surprising way to express his mounting frustration at the insidious forces of commercialism that are forcing out the neighbors he cares most about. Initially inspired by a prank that the writer-director Neo Sora (The Chicken, 2020) had pulled on him in his childhood, a sense of warm nostalgia and cold, material reality intermingle to tell a tale set in the not-so-distant future about disappearing spaces and the forces of policing and gentrification that drills this process forward.
