HIDE

Four strangers (Hitoshi Ozawa, Haruna Yabuki, Takeshi Onishi, Katsuya) answer an online ad for a “high-paying job.” The task: Kidnap a yakuza boss. They don’t know each other’s faces or identities—but a dangerous trap awaits. The client is among them. Betrayal and secrets surface as their true identities are revealed. Who is the mastermind pulling the strings? A bold, new-style action entertainment from OZAWA.

Takachiho (Hitoshi Ozawa), a loan officer at the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, leaks information about an unlisted stock deal and is convicted of insider trading. With his arrest, his powerful backers—his vice-minister father-in-law and the Nakai-gumi, who suffered massive losses—begin cutting him loose. Behind bars, Takachiho quietly waits for his chance to escape. His only possible ally is Oshiro (Masahiro Chono), the Nakai-gumi’s young boss—but everything may be part of the organization’s trap. What is Takachiho's true objective? And what fate awaits the man who deceived both the state and the yakuza?

An overly curious journalist sits face to face with a resident of the mysterious district of North Shinjuku. One is trying to understand the codes and unspoken truths of a closed community; the other gradually reveals his world. Daisuke Miyazaki delivers an unorthodox, futuristic sci-fi full of recursive effects and false appearances. Shot in lustrous black and white, featuring a series of still images, this impossible dialogue is like a response from the future to Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Harrowing yet leavened by humour, the story includes street kids, ancestral pariahs and, as you’d expect, yakuzas.