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Whereas Takeshi Kitano’s ninth feature as a director seems like a return to the yakuza genre, and thus characters and themes he had already explored in works like “Sonatine”, “Violent Cop” and “Hana-Bi”, the project itself marks a fundamental turning point in the career of the filmmaker. For a long time, he and producer Masayuki Mori had been negotiating with US-American producer Jeremy Thomas for “Brother”, a film whose story would be set in both Japan and the USA, more specifically Tokyo and Los Angeles. As Thomas puts it, the greatest challenge was to make sure Kitano would have the same working conditions in the United States he was accustomed to from his works in Japan. Eventually, “Brother” began filming in late 1999 and was finished in early 2000, and thus became an entry into the director’s filmography which seems to divide his fans to this day.

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Out of great pain can sometimes come great joy, just ask documentarian Dan Sickles, one of the directors behind the Sundance Grand Jury-prize winning documentary “Dina.”

For Sickles, the intensely personal doc has an added dimension — he and co-director Antonio Santini were completing their first film together, “Mala Mala,” when both of Sickles’ parents passed away. In order for the pair to juggle both the editing of the film and Sickles’ new familial responsibilities, they picked up and moved, along with editor Sofia Subercaseaux, to suburban Philadelphia, the home of the Sickles’ family. That’s where a new story awaited them.

Read More:‘Dina’ Review: An Asperger’s Doc That Dares To Find Sex On The Spectrum — Sundance 2017

Sickles’ father had been a friend and a mentor to the eponymous Dina since he taught her at the local high school, eventually helping to co-found the Abington Aktion Club, a social...

★★★★☆ Having directed two crime films, Japanese director Takeshi 'Beat' Kitano downshifted in 1991 with A Scene at the Sea, a simple and direct fable about a young deaf man who becomes obsessed with surfing. Working as a garbage man, Shigeru (Claude Maki), finds a broken surf board and takes it home to repair it. Initially hopeless at surfing, and mocked by his footballing peers, Shigeru perseveres, over time becoming more skilled and entering a competition. That's really all there is to the story, but as with all Kitano's films the real drama is to be found between the moments of action.

I interviewed Takeshi Kitano, aka "Beat" Takeshi, in spring of 2001 regarding "Brother," his first film shot on American soil. Kitano is arguably, still, the biggest star in Japan, one whose influence crosscuts virtually all areas of media.

Memories: Kitano was surrounded by a small entourage of Japanese men, one of whom was his interpreter. He was formal and stoic in his interaction with me, but never unfriendly. As Sofia Coppola so deftly portrayed in "Lost in Translation," the English to Japanese process of translating can often be time-consuming for what amounts to seemingly little that's been said. Kitano rarely made eye contact or smiled, although when he would laugh softly, a crooked grin would form on one side of his mouth, the right. The other striking thing about Kitano's appearance was a tic, or slight tremor, that would appear on the left side of his face, the after-effect of a...