Directory of World Cinema: Japan

Machisu is a painter. He never had the success he thinks he is entitled to. Regardless of this, he always remains trying to be successful. His wife Sachiko keeps supporting him, despite all setbacks.

After death, people have a week to choose only one memory to keep for eternity.

The problematic lives of teenager students for whom the singer Lily Chou-Chou's dreamy music is the only way to escape an alienating, violent and insensitive society.

Two young guys work in a plant that manufactures oshibori (those moist hand-towels found in some Japanese restaurants). Their weird bond is based on uncontrollable rage--something neither can articulate or control--and the strange jellyfish that they keep as a pet.

A tragicomedy about two listless friends who fall for the same girl and try to find out what they want from their life.

Obsessed with the idea of owning his first car so he can have sex in it, a young man takes any job he can find and ends up in an escalating series of crazy situations.

A family moves to the country to run a rustic mountain inn when, to their horror, the customers begin befalling sudden and unlikely fates.

A young, naive boy sets out alone on the road to find his wayward mother. Soon he finds an unlikely protector in a crotchety man and the two have a series of unexpected adventures along the way.

A high school girl engages in compensated dating in order to buy an expensive ring before the day ends.

Two seemingly innocent school kids are obsessed in fetishistic s&m games.

Teenager Noriko Shimabara abandons her family, seeking Kumiko, an online group's leader. She joins Kumiko's circle, which spirals after 54 students commit mass suicide.

The lives of a young, hearing-impaired and gloomy couple are fulfilled after the boy holds interest in surfboarding.

This surreal Japanese thriller blurs the lines between reality and fantasy as a man searches for his missing wife while all the time he's infatuated with the latest novel by his favourite mystery writer.

Suspecting that his childhood friend, a professional boxer, is having a love affair with his fiancée, a businessman starts training rigorously in order to take him down.

An ordinary Japanese family slowly disintegrates after its patriarch loses his job at a prominent company.

When technical illustrator Tony Takitani asks his wife to resist her all-consuming obsession for designer clothes, the consequences are tragic.

A secret military project endangers Neo-Tokyo when it turns a biker gang member into a rampaging psychic psychopath who can only be stopped by a teenager, his gang of biker friends and a group of psychics.

Two biologists attempt to distribute the cure for a demonic virus spreading throughout Japan, but when one of them is infected, he must learn to harness his demon side.

The adventures of the unlicensed but genius doctor Black Jack, who encounters extraordinary people and phenomena as he attends to unusual medical cases.

A dashing thief, his gang of desperadoes and an intrepid cop struggle to free a princess from an evil count, and learn the secret of a treasure that she holds part of the key to.

In a post-nuclear hellscape, a master of the deadly martial art "Hokuto Shinken" allies with two kids and an expert in "Nanto Suicho-Ken" to battle the tyrants who kidnapped his lover.

A cyborg policewoman and her partner hunt a mysterious and powerful hacker called the Puppet Master.

In the year 2032, Batô, a cyborg detective for the anti-terrorist unit Public Security Section 9, investigates the case of a female robot--one created solely for sexual pleasure--who slaughtered her owner.

A young boy and his little sister struggle to survive in Japan during World War II.

When an unconfident young woman is cursed with an old body by a spiteful witch, her only chance of breaking the spell lies with a self-indulgent yet insecure young wizard and his companions in his legged, walking castle.