Hiroshi Akutagawa

In the summer of 1941, the United States and Japan seem on the brink of war after constant embargos and failed diplomacy come to no end. "Tora! Tora! Tora!", named after the code words used by the lead Japanese pilot to indicate they had surprised the Americans, covers the days leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which plunged America into the Second World War.

On a Tokyo dump’s shantytown edge, interwoven vignettes follow residents scraping by: a boy who “drives” an imaginary trolley, a homeless father and son designing a dream house, a young woman brutalized at home, drunks, schemers, and saints of small kindnesses. Kurosawa crafts a ragged mosaic of hardship, fantasy, and flickers of grace that keep people moving forward.

An outlaw pushes the residents of Edo's red light district to rebel against a growing number of stifling, moralistic laws.

The struggles of a low-ranking samurai (Nakamura) coming to terms with the end of the Tokugawa shogunate and the end of Japan's feudal age with the 1868 Restoration.

Aldin, a vagabond water vendor, embarks of a series of fantastical and tragic misadventures through the Middle East in search of love, fortune, and power.

Long takes and a highly theatrical visual approach combine to form a tense and confrontational look at the decline of a socialist student activists' movement in Japan.

This anthology film consists of nine incidents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when assassins changed the course of Japanese history.

Takamura, a poet and sculptor, marries a budding artist named Chieko who dreams of becoming an oil painter. When a series of hardships befall her family, she finds herself unable to confide in her husband, and the pain she carries within begins to weigh heavily on her sanity...

In this Japanese drama, a village girl goes to Tokyo and becomes a sex worker to support her ailing mother. While there she meets a teacher and falls in love.

A Hiromichi Horikawa movie

No synopsis available yet.

Documentary on the city of Kyoto, Japan. Topics include the Ryoanji Temple stone garden, a geisha residence, the Katsura Imperial Villa, and the Gion Festival.

On his way back to Japan after two years in the desert, oil company engineer Sakamoto visits his friend Katori in Hong Kong. Soon after, Sakamoto learns that Katori has disappeared.

A Japanese film from 1963, Directed by Shirô Toyoda.

This is the sequel to Jose Torres (1959), the portrayal of Puerto Rican boxer Jose Torres, who won a silver medal in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. We follow Torres from his training in preparation to challenge world lightweight champion Willie Pastrano, to the match and Torres’ victory in 1965. The contrast between the nervous Torres before the match, filmed in painstaking detail, and the first round, filmed in one shot, is striking.

A romance between a young koto prodigy and the head of a koto school’s daughter.

No synopsis available yet.

A poor rickshaw driver finds himself helping a young woman and her son after the woman's husband dies suddenly.

Saburo and Keiko fall in love with each other but the tide of war separates them.

A Japanese woman writes down three stories she has witnessed or heard of in her diary, each about the difficult situation a young woman finds herself in.

A traditional bar mistress in Kyoto clashes with her Tokyo rival.

The story of a novelist whose wife is confined in a mental hospital. His love for her drives him to write about her, though he runs into trouble when her parents accuse him of cashing in on her misfortune.

A great ambition to portray with sharp satire and humor the course of modern anxiety and love that is about to be driven to despair.

A moving episode in which a war criminal in the Philippines, having faced death, pleads earnestly while trembling with fear.

A young woman, who must support her father as a middle-aged man's mistress, finds herself falling in love with a student closer to her age.

Where Chimneys Are Seen focuses primarily on the interconnected lives of two couples in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Senju, a poor industrial section of Tokyo.

No synopsis available yet.

Tragi-comedy about the inhabitants of a remote, mountain-locked village where only the first-born sons are allowed to marry and have children.

Shunji Mitamura's wife died very early and left him a young son. Shunji's sister Hideko decided to fulfill her sisterly duty and moved to the main character to take care of the boy and the house. Time passes and Shunji marries Mieko Takamine. But since her father is often ill, she spends a lot of time in his dental clinic to do his work.

Pacific war documentary culled from approximately 40,000 feet of Nippon Eiga Shinsha wartime stock, as well from British and American sources. Film traces the war from the invasion and occupation of China to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese defeat. Included if footage of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the capture of Hong Kong, B-29 bombings of Japan, and kamikaze sinking of American warships.

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

This celebrated documentary, filmed in colour, depicts one of the most famous of all Japanese temples. Horyu-ji, in the small town of Ikaruga outside Japan’s ancient capital of Nara, was one of the first Buddhist places of worship established in Japan, and contains the oldest surviving wooden buildings in the world, dating from the seventh century.