An Ode to Yakuza
Tatematsu Minoru, a yakuza belonging to the Ishikawa group that runs the Shinjuku area, has a beautiful sister named Akane. He dreams of sending her to college and turning her…
The Most Valuable Wife
In the forties in Japan, a group of brilliantly qualified university students are selected to break all ties with their previous lives and form the Japanese spy service.
The Blue Sky Maiden
Yuko is sent to the coastal regions to be raised away from the rest of her sophisticated family where she finds out from her ill grandmother that she is not…
The School of Spies
Nakano Institution is the so-called ‘Spy School’ where many young men are trained to be excellent spies. They erase their names, families, even lovers to bury themselves in training. Jiro,…
Lullaby of the Earth
The story of an orphan girl, brought up in naive, rustic innocence by an elderly relative, who is suddenly exposed to the brutality, greed and deceptiveness of the outside world…
Blind Beast
A blind sculptor kidnaps an artists’ model and imprisons her in his warehouse studio – a shadowland of perverse monuments to the female form. Here a deranged passion play of…
Afraid to Die
On his release from prison a young yakuza, along with his brother, decides to turn his back on criminal life instead of taking over the position of his recently deceased…
Double Suicide of Sonezaki
Suicide has long been used as a form of social protest in Japan. In this film, set in 1703, samurai culture is being transformed by the emergence of a new…
Manji
The four principals in a love affair collide when jealousy, blackmail and suicide enter the picture.
Giants and Toys
Nishi is an advertising executive for a caramel company that is planning to launch a new product, in fierce competition with two other companies.
Bridge of Japan
Ichikawa’s 1956 adaptation of Nihonbashi was the first to take the work of Kyoka Izumi— until then regarded as a writer of common tragic melodramas—and re-evaluate it as a tanbi-ha…
Street of Shame
The lives of five prostitutes employed at a Japanese brothel while the nation is debating the passage of an anti-prostitution law.