2/'21 21st Century Japan P.2

EVENT: 21ST CENTURY JAPAN: FILMS FROM 2001-2020
DATES: February 5-25, 2021
VENUE: Online

As Japan’s film industry enters its third decade in the new millennium, this 30-film ACA Cinema Project online series takes a look back at the last 20 years of Japanese cinema to celebrate some of the most remarkable narrative fiction films and filmmakers that define the era. Covering a wide range of production styles and genres—from small budget independent debuts to festival favorites and award-winning major studio releases—this diverse slate of feature and short films offers a guided tour of modern Japanese cinema, including special spotlights dedicated to the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and a selection of breakout films by up-and-coming filmmakers. Co-presented by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in collaboration with Visual Industry Promotion Organization.

Event Title: A Conversation with Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Speaker: Kiyoshi Kurosawa(Director), Kent Jones（Writer/Director)
Moderator: Abi Sakamoto（Institut français du Japon）

Event Title: "What Is Japanese Cinema in the 21st Century?" The Filmmakers' Perspective Part 1 Directors
Speaker: Sion Sono (Red Post on Escher Street, 2020), Yukiko Mishima (Shape of Red, 2020), Kei Ishikawa (Listen to the Universe, 2019), Shuichi Okita (Mori, the Artist’s Habitat, 2018), Satoko Yokohama (The Actor, 2016), Shinya Tsukamoto (Fires on the Plain, 2015), Kazuya Shiraishi (The Devil’s Path, 2013), Nobuhiro Yamashita (The Drudgery Train, 2012), Yuki Tanada (One Million Yen Girl, 2008), Naoko Ogigami (Yoshino’s Barber Shop, 2004), Isshin Inudo (Josee, the Tiger and the Fish, 2003), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Bright Future, 2003; Real, 2013; Journey to the Shore, 2015)

Event Title: "What Is Japanese Cinema in the 21st Century?" A Film Critic's Perspective Part 2 Critic
Speaker: Mark Schilling(film critic)

Title: Sway
Director: Miwa Nishikawa
2006/119 min./ Japan

[STORY] After a long absence, fashion photographer Takeru (Joe Odagiri) returns from Tokyo to his rural hometown to attend his mother’s memorial service. Free from small town obligations, the Tokyo transplant barely conceals his condescension to his meek older brother Minoru (Teruyuki Kagawa), who inherited the humble family business. When the siblings take a trip to a nearby ravine with their childhood friend, a tragedy occurs that tests their relationship and reveals long-gestating resentments between them. This suspenseful and deeply felt exploration of familial ties by former Hirokazu Kore-eda acolyte Miwa Nishikawa (Under the Open Sky) launched the director as a major talent in contemporary Japanese cinema.

© 2006 SWAY Production Committee

Title: The Great Yokai War
Director: Takashi Miike
2005/124 min./ Japan

[STORY] Waking to prescient dreams of a Tokyo in ruins, young Tadashi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) finds himself swept up in a real life spirit war after being named “Kirin Rider” during a local matsuri. Befriending the mythical yokai of Japanese folklore, Tadashi and his newfound companions must confront the malevolent villain Yasunori Kato (Etsushi Toyokawa) who, in preparation for the impending war, has been twisting spirits into demonic machines. Escalating into a boisterous romp through the spiritual realm, The Great Yokai War features a phantasmagorical assortment of yokai (from Kasa-obake to Yuki-onna) as cult director Takashi Miike’s madcap flair for eye-popping visuals culminates into a special effects-laden spectacle for all ages.

Title: Yoshino’s Barber Shop
Director: Naoko Ogigami
2004/96 min./ Japan

[STORY] In a small rural town where everyone knows each other, all boys have the same bowl haircuts known as the “Yoshino Cut,” a local tradition administered by the town’s proud (and sole) barber Mrs. Yoshino (Masako Motai). When a new kid with a cool haircut arrives from Tokyo and refuses to comply, however, four fifth-grader friends find their lives forever changed. A visually inventive debut feature that playfully considers conformity and tradition, director Naoko Ogigami gives special attention to the gestures, sounds and the comical inner-lives of her characters, bringing the light touch of Jacques Tati to her fictional Japanese countryside.

Title: Josee, The Tiger, and the Fish
Director: Isshin Inudo
2003/116 min./ Japan

[STORY] Through a haphazard series of events, lackadaisical college student Tsuneo (Satoshi Tsuambuki) finds himself entangled in the life of “Josee” (Chizuru Ikewaki), a young, strong-willed paraplegic woman and social recluse who named herself after a character in one of her favorite novels. As the pair’s friendship blossoms into romance, they find their worldviews expanded and enriched through each other in unexpected ways. A genuinely moving reflection on love and loss adapted from a short story by Seiko Tanabe, Isshin Inudo’s breakout independent feature film was a box office sensation that has since remained in the cultural consciousness: a Japanese anime adaptation and a Korean live action remake were both released within the last year.

Title: The Twilight Samurai
Director: Yoji Yamada
2002/129 min./ Japan

[STORY] At the turn of the Meiji era in late 1860s Japan, an impoverished and low-ranking samurai named Seibei (Hiroyuki Sanada) cares for two young daughters and a senile mother while working as a stock clerk. A widower, Seibei is too busy and embarrassed of his poverty to consider remarrying, but when he is introduced to his best friend’s sister Tomoe (Rie Miyazawa), new possibilities are opened for him and his family. That is, until he is called upon to risk his life for the clan. A subversively unromantic depiction of the last days of the samurai, this late-period masterpiece from 71-year-old Tora-san director Yoji Yamada defies all expectations.

Title: Hush!
Director: Ryosuke Hashiguchi
2001/135 min./ Japan

[STORY] Soon after the disparate yet compatible Naoya (Kazuya Takahashi) and Katsuhiro (Seiichi Tanabe) start to settle into a relationship, a slightly unhinged young woman named Asako (Reiko Kataoka) asks Katsuhiro to father her child. While the couple navigate the implications of this unexpected proposal, they are forced to confront their conflicting understandings of what it means to be gay and in a committed relationship. A landmark work of LGBTQ Japanese cinema by pioneering director Ryosuke Hashiguchi, Hush! humorously and poignantly upends the traditional Japanese genre of the family drama to offer a deeply human story about three people doing their best to be true to themselves.

Title: Bright Future
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
2003/115 min./ Japan

[STORY] Aimless and antisocial twentysomethings Mamoru (Tadanobu Asano) and Yuji (Joe Odagiri) share jobs at the same towel factory where they are irritated by a boss who is overly eager to befriend them. When Mamoru goes to extreme measures to deal with their problem and ends up in jail, he asks Yuji to look after his sole interest: a beautifully luminous jellyfish that is deadly upon contact. Making the most of his first time shooting on video, Kiyoshi Kurosawa finds new ways to imbue his signature sense of otherworldly dread in this enigmatic and haunting vision of disaffected youth at the end of their rope.

Title: Journey to the Shore
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
2015/128 min./ Japan

[STORY] Three years after his disappearance, Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano) returns home one night to his wife Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu) who is initially unphased by his sudden reappearance. Disclosing to her that he is indeed dead, Yusuke asks Mizuki to accompany him on a journey to see “beautiful places” and guides her to the people and places he encountered on his return voyage to her. As they travel, the pair confront the unresolved feelings and pent-up emotions they never had the chance to reconcile. An unconventional ghost story, Kurosawa’s tender melodrama is a lyrical rumination on dealing with grief and the inevitable parting of ways.

Title: Real
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
2013/127 min./ Japan

[STORY] A year after his longtime partner Atsumi (Haruka Ayase) is left comatose from a suicide attempt, Koichi (Takeru Satoh) is offered a chance to make contact with her consciousness through an experimental process called “sensing.” Venturing into her mind, Koichi discovers Atsumi languishing in a twilight world—an abject realm of her troubled psyche with ghostly manifestations that begin to bleed over into his own reality. Driven by brooding atmospherics and Kurosawa’s philosophical considerations, Real delivers an uncanny descent into the unknown as Koichi traverses Atsumi’s subconsciousness in an Orphean bid to bring his dreaming lover back to the living.

Title: Blanka
Director: Kohki Hasei
2015/75 min./ Italy, Philippines, Japan

[STORY] This international co-production set in the Philippines offers a bittersweet depiction of life on the streets for Blanka (Cydel Gabutero), a savvy 11-year-old orphan who begs and pickpockets in order to survive while hoping to save enough money to “buy” a mother. When Blanka forms a bond with a blind guitar player named Peter (Peter Millari), who discovers her singing talent, the duo start to turn their luck around as music performers—but can such happiness last? Equally heartwarming and heartbreaking, this narrative fiction feature debut by documentarian Kohki Hasei considers a child’s point of view in order to suggest hope in the face of adversity.

Title: The Chicken
Director: Neo Sora
2020/13 min./ USA

[STORY] On a peculiarly hot November afternoon, a young Japanese immigrant named Hiro (Junshin Soga) welcomes his cousin Kei (Taiju Nakane) to New York City. Scouting out a new apartment in Chinatown, Hiro takes Kei along for the ride and, on a whim, decides to buy a live chicken to butcher for dinner. As they traverse the city, the pair are shaken up by a medical emergency on the street that brings to relief their unwitting complicity in everyday instances of structural violence—and upsets Hiro’s dinner plans. Gorgeously shot on 16mm, Neo Sora’s deftly directed short film reinterprets a century-old short story by Naoya Shiga to offer pointed commentary on contemporary life.

Title: Complicity
Director: Kei Chikaura
2018/116 min./ Japan

[STORY] Chen Liang (Yulai Lu), an undocumented Chinese immigrant in Japan, acquires a fake ID belonging to an existing person through a shady black market transaction. Spending his days doing illicit odd jobs that put him at risk for deportation, a new opportunity (meant for his identity’s real-life counterpart) leads him to a Japanese soba shop where he apprentices for an elderly soba master (Tatsuya Fuji, In The Realm of the Senses) who takes him under his wing. A moving debut feature from director Kei Chikaura, Complicity delivers a compassionate portrait of the immigrant experience in Japan and the struggle to live while in constant fear of being exposed.

Title: Lying to Mom
Director: Katsumi Nojiri
2019/133 min./ Japan

[STORY] When stay-at-home mother Yuko (Hideko Hara) discovers the hanging corpse of her hikikomori (shut-in) son Koichi (Ryo Kase), she passes out from shock and goes into a coma. Waking in a hospital over a month later on the 49th day since Koichi’s passing, Yuko recalls nothing of the incident. On impulse, her daughter Fumi (Mai Kiryu) tells Yuko that Koichi is alive and well in Argentina—the first lie in a saga of deception that unfurls as Yuko’s family attempts to hide the truth from her. The debut feature by writer/director Katsumi Nojiri, who deftly handles the morose subject matter in a gently humorous way that offers earnest insight on family dynamics and the process of dealing with loss.

Title: Our House
Director: Yui Kiyohara
2017/81 min./ Japan

[STORY] Despite sharing a residence, Seri (Nodoka Kawanishi)—a schoolgirl living with her widowed mother—and Toko (Mei Fujiwara)—a young woman who has taken in an amnesiac named Sana (Mariwo Osawa)—seem to live their lives in parallel universes. As time goes on, however, the liminal spaces between them begin to converge and intertwine in enigmatic ways. The debut feature by Yui Kiyohara (who made the film as a thesis project for film school at Tokyo University of the Arts), Our House elicits an aura of mystery and intrigue that imbues the domestic drama with a beguiling ambience and recalls the works of mentor Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Title: Plan 75
Director: Chie Hayakawa
2018/112 min./ Japan

[STORY] Set in the not-so-distant future where Japan’s increasing elderly populations have become detrimental to the country’s growth, this dystopian short film imagines a government initiative in which retired seniors—and other citizens deemed unproductive—are efficiently and systematically eliminated on a volunteer basis. Filmed as part of the omnibus feature film Ten Years Japan (2018), director Chie Hayakawa’s powerful work of speculative fiction offers pointed political commentary and a chilling vision of the potential future of so-called developed nations wherein the value of human lives is measured by the bottom line.

EVENT: 21ST CENTURY JAPAN: FILMS FROM 2001-2020DATES: February 5-25, 2021VENUE: Online

EVENT: 21ST CENTURY JAPAN: FILMS FROM 2001-2020
DATES: February 5-25, 2021
VENUE: Online