Takashi Ito

Three cat burgling sisters have to go up against the police and a Chinese crime syndicate in order to rescue their kidnapped father.

Jigoku Gokurakumaru is a samurai on the run. One bounty hunter hoping to collect the sizeable reward is Teppo Oyuri, a comely lass who is an ace shot with her pearl-laden pistol. Before she can set her sights on Gokurakumaru, he is attacked by a hoard of sword-wielding thugs also hoping to collect the reward. He dispatches them with bloody aplomb. Later, Gokurakumaru and Oyuri -- who has fallen for the master swordsman in spite of herself -- venture to Zipang, the Land of Gold, in search of a magical gold sword.

Shortly after moving to the suburbs, the Kobayashis start to come undone. Convinced a family curse is at the root of their erratic behavior, the man of the house takes it upon himself to course-correct before it takes the last of their sanity.

A talk show hostess takes a camera crew out to an abandoned factory to investigate a purported snuff film that was made there. As she gets closer to the truth, she and her friends are subjected to a brutal nightmare.

Story about a poor Japanese woman living near an American army base who resorts to prostitution.

Jidai-geki starring Kanjuro Arashi

"With this work, I developed/fleshed out the idea I had when making GHOST of peeling only the skin from various objects in the room, floating the skins in midair and then sticking them on different objects. This film was also shot entirely frame-by-frame with long-exposures. Along with GRIM, its meaning is 'as if to do forever.'" - Takashi Ito

A woman’s face disappearing behind, and emerging from, a pair of hands. Flashing lights. An empty building full of dark hallways. Designs drawn in the air with light and long-exposure cinematography.

"The further developed and completed version of a 15-second advertisement for an interior design firm on which I had worked. It repeats over and over again the violent back-and-forth, half-revolving motions of a giant brick storehouse inside the frame of a hand-held photograph. I wanted to emphasis the flat nature of the photograph while creating a dynamic feeling of depth inside the photograph's frame." - Takashi Ito

A series of 16 "short stories" created by the creator's group Images Forum.

"In the early afternoon, a mother holding her child stands still in the park of a housing project. The kind of sight that is a symbol of beauty and love. Be as that may be, they have no face. The camera is aimed persistently at the spot from which they have vanished as if to find something. A work that began out of the search to understand the relation between the family and the self." - Takashi Ito

Fragmentary stories of two students with a video camera and an old butoh dancer who finds himself followed by a woman are interwoven.

"The majority of my 8-mm works were made for the three-minute "Personal Focus" film special put on in Fukuoka. This film is an animation of photographs I had taken on a regular basis as a sort of diary, and was made to have a rough feel to it." - Takashi Ito

"Ryuta is 5 years old. Even though he is my son, I sometimes wonder what this small person is to me. Even though I see his joys and sadnesses and know the feel of his warmth on my skin when I hold him, there are moments when my feelings for him become vague and blank." - Takashi Ito

I turned my gaze to the various events in daily life and made this filmic diary in a manner as if confessing my feelings. Of course, since I was making the film, I wanted to depict these feelings and events with tricky techniques. I used various methods to shoot photographs of a relative's wedding, the landscape I see from window of my house, commemorative travel photographs and the like frame-by-frame.

In the final scene of my last work, A SILENT DAY, a girl was filming herself with an 8mm camera on a railway bridge. Although the film doesn’t depict the incident, she later jumped off the bridge in an attempt to kill herself. Two girls witnessed her attempted suicide, and in this film I am attempting to depict the broken state of their psyches. In this piece, various images have been generated as a result of my professional interaction with a number of young people with mental illnesses, and the unstable state of mind which I have often experienced in recent days - Takashi Ito

"Three Women, is an ambitious work designed to be shown on multiple screens in a movie theater. Moving a step forward from the use of multiple screens as an expansion of cinema as exemplified by Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927), it presents what is literally a conceptual expansion of cinema in the form of a filmic work experienced in a theater in which the 15-channel, surround-sound audio constructed by Araki Masamitsu and Ito’s visuals organically intertwine."

Haunting light and haunted spaces, otherworldly movement and abstracted time. A ghost visits an apartment complex.

A work produced for the Morimura Yasumasa Exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art, (April 6 to June, 1996). It was shown in an old-style theater constructed within the exhibit space that featured photographs of Morimura playing famous foreign and Japanese actresses.

A field of wilted sunflowers, a group of public housing units turned into ruins. Two girls who are like alter egos of each other. They wander around with a camera, one pointing it at mysterious things and at herself, the other hanging a black dress in various places and taking pictures of it.