Takashi Nishihara

Nana is 19 and lives in a corner of Tokyo. Her birth mother and Marin, a girl the same age who she loves, were the only people she could trust. Nana confronts them in her yearning for love, but the world does not give it to her. With her whole life ahead of her, Nana struggles, suffers, and begins a search for the true meaning of love.

Sisterhood portrays a current reality in Japan, showing the vision and lives of different people, such as a nude model, a music artist, a student and other diverse individuals who give their opinions in front of the camera.

This documentary follows the daily lives of blind and deaf people: deaf-blind people living alone on Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture; a man in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, who chose to live in his community despite the earthquake and tsunami; a young man in Hiroshima who wants to be independent so that he can marry while continuing to practice judo; Professor Satoshi Fukushima of the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology who became the first deaf-blind person to teach full-time at a university in the world.

In a country ruled by the Liberal Democratic Party, running on austerity and neoliberal ambitions, for most of its postwar years, gender and economic inequalities have become increasingly acute in Japan. Takashi Nishihara, a filmmaker who has been following the youth protests in Japan notices that there is one party that seems to be raising issues of gender and economic in the political sphere, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), a party about to enter its hundredth year and consistently burdened by its historical connotations. Though an outsider of the party, Nishihara gained unprecedented access to the JCP and driven by his interest in the younger party members who find hope in the JCP, the resulting documentary goes beyond party politics and observes the current grassroots leftist movements in Japan. It also becomes witness to the larger and deep-seated patriarchal system that continues to quell momentums of hope.

A man and a woman at the mercy of fate.

A college student, along with her peers in Japan, rally to change the country’s hostile immigration laws that have incarcerated asylum-seekers in deadly detention centers. Meanwhile, over a century since the 1923 massacre of Korean people during a massive earthquake in Imperial Japan, young activists today take on the torch to seek justice under a government that continues to deny this history. A filmmaker documenting these young activists on the ground begins to excavate the underlying history of discrimination that connects the massacre of a hundred years ago and the draconian refugee system in Japan. Through the process of listening to voices from the past and present, the landscapes in Tokyo begin to echo the unfinished business of the nation’s reckoning with its colonial history.

Nana is 19 and lives in a corner of Tokyo. Her birth mother and Marin, a girl the same age who she loves, were the only people she could trust. Nana confronts them in her yearning for love, but the world does not give it to her. With her whole life ahead of her, Nana struggles, suffers, and begins a search for the true meaning of love.

Nana is 19 and lives in a corner of Tokyo. Her birth mother and Marin, a girl the same age who she loves, were the only people she could trust. Nana confronts them in her yearning for love, but the world does not give it to her. With her whole life ahead of her, Nana struggles, suffers, and begins a search for the true meaning of love.

Nana is 19 and lives in a corner of Tokyo. Her birth mother and Marin, a girl the same age who she loves, were the only people she could trust. Nana confronts them in her yearning for love, but the world does not give it to her. With her whole life ahead of her, Nana struggles, suffers, and begins a search for the true meaning of love.

Sisterhood portrays a current reality in Japan, showing the vision and lives of different people, such as a nude model, a music artist, a student and other diverse individuals who give their opinions in front of the camera.

Sisterhood portrays a current reality in Japan, showing the vision and lives of different people, such as a nude model, a music artist, a student and other diverse individuals who give their opinions in front of the camera.

This documentary follows the daily lives of blind and deaf people: deaf-blind people living alone on Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture; a man in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, who chose to live in his community despite the earthquake and tsunami; a young man in Hiroshima who wants to be independent so that he can marry while continuing to practice judo; Professor Satoshi Fukushima of the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology who became the first deaf-blind person to teach full-time at a university in the world.

In a country ruled by the Liberal Democratic Party, running on austerity and neoliberal ambitions, for most of its postwar years, gender and economic inequalities have become increasingly acute in Japan. Takashi Nishihara, a filmmaker who has been following the youth protests in Japan notices that there is one party that seems to be raising issues of gender and economic in the political sphere, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), a party about to enter its hundredth year and consistently burdened by its historical connotations. Though an outsider of the party, Nishihara gained unprecedented access to the JCP and driven by his interest in the younger party members who find hope in the JCP, the resulting documentary goes beyond party politics and observes the current grassroots leftist movements in Japan. It also becomes witness to the larger and deep-seated patriarchal system that continues to quell momentums of hope.

A man and a woman at the mercy of fate.

A man and a woman at the mercy of fate.

A college student, along with her peers in Japan, rally to change the country’s hostile immigration laws that have incarcerated asylum-seekers in deadly detention centers. Meanwhile, over a century since the 1923 massacre of Korean people during a massive earthquake in Imperial Japan, young activists today take on the torch to seek justice under a government that continues to deny this history. A filmmaker documenting these young activists on the ground begins to excavate the underlying history of discrimination that connects the massacre of a hundred years ago and the draconian refugee system in Japan. Through the process of listening to voices from the past and present, the landscapes in Tokyo begin to echo the unfinished business of the nation’s reckoning with its colonial history.