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Nearly a decade after its debut in competition at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered alongside the likes of Goodbye to Language, Winter Sleep, Clouds of Sils Maria, Maps to the Stars, and Two Days, One Night, Naomi Kawase’s drama Still the Water is getting a North American home courtesy of Film Movement. Ahead of a March 3 digital release, we’re exclusively debuting the new trailer for the film starring Nijirô Murakami, Junko Abe, Miyuki Matsuda, Tetta Sugimoto, and Makiko Watanabe.

On the subtropical Japanese island of Amami, traditions about nature remain eternal. Following a typhoon and during the full-moon night of traditional dances in August, 16-year-old Kaito (Nijirô Murakami) discovers a dead body floating in the sea. His girlfriend, Kyoko (Junko Abe), will attempt to help him understand this mysterious discovery. Together, Kaito and Kyoko will learn to become adults by experiencing the interwoven cycles of life,...

Synopsis

On the subtropical Japanese island of Amami, traditions about nature remain eternal. Following a typhoon and during the full-moon night of traditional dances in August, 16-year-old Kaito (Nijirô Murakami) discovers a dead body floating in the sea. His girlfriend, Kyoko (Junko Abe), will attempt to help him understand this mysterious discovery. Together, Kaito and Kyoko will learn to become adults by experiencing the interwoven cycles of life, death and love.

Kawase, one of Japan’s most celebrated contemporary directors and the youngest filmmaker to be awarded the Cannes Camera d’Or for her debut film “Suzaku” in 1987, was nominated for a Palme d’Or for Still The Water; the film also captured awards for Best Director and Best Cinematography at the 2015 RiverRun International Film Festival.

Director’S Bio: Naomi Kawase

Born and raised in Nara, Kawase graduated from Visual Arts Osaka in 1989. Her films, “Embracing” (1992) and “Katatsumori” (1994) received international...

Quite a weird year for Japanese cinema, since there was no definite masterpiece this year, in the fashion of “Shoplifters” for example, while short and mid-length movies seem to have been rising intently in quality, a tendency that actually extended to a number of Asian countries, including Korea. At the same time, the “issues” of Japanese cinema, particularly the lack of mid-budget films and the “Koreeda style” of filmmaking that usually results in invitations to (big) festivals continue to happen, and along with the #MeToo movement hitting the industry quite hard, resulted in a year for local productions that is by no means great. At the same time, however, the size of the industry in terms of number of productions still gave way to a number of titles to stand out, 20 of which are to be found here. This time, the main criteria, besides the always present diversity, is films...

Show Kasamatsu moved to Tokyo in 2011 to become an actor and has been genuinely engaged in his show business career from 2013.From 2018 to 2021, he appeared in 52 dramas. In 2019, he was in the first place among Japanese male actors by the number of movie and drama appearances respectively. He was also ranked No.1 in the Toyo Keizai’s ranking of “Unexpected Actors Most Supported by the Production Field Today”. He was selected by director Michael Mann to play the main character Sato in “Tokyo Vice” through an audition. This drama was co-produced by Wowow and HBO Max.

On the occasion of “Ring Wandering” screening at Fantasia Film Festival, we speak with him about the role of Sosuke, reading manga, how he picks his roles and other topics

“Ring Wandering” screened on Fantasia International Film Festival

What drew you in the role of Sosuke? How would you describe Sosuke as a person?...

Back in the late 19th century, Japan started to modernize itself to catch up with the West and to raise its economic and military power. This effort however, had a significant impact to the country’s long lasting healthy ecosystem, with the extinction of the Japanese wolf being one of the consequences. Taking inspiration from this fact, Masakazu Kaneko pens and directs “Ring Wandering”, a rather interesting movie that unfolds on a number of levels.

“Ring Wandering” is screening on Fantasia International Film Festival

Sosuke is an aspiring manga artist, though for the moment he’s stuck doing heavy labor on construction jobs in central Tokyo. At the same time, he is trying to finish his manga about the battle of a hunter and a Japanese wolf taking place during the Russo-Japanese war. He is struggling however, particularly in drawing the animal, since no one has seen one for over a century.

From the director’s statement regarding the film: “Last year I lost one of my closest friends. Kuriki Nobukazu, who was a well-known mountain climber, died during his 8th attempt to climb Mount Everest. My first encounter with Mr. Kuriki was the premiere of Noise, the first feature film I directed. He praised my first feature film, and since then we often met and talked. We decided to make a documentary film of Mr. Kuriki attempting to climb Everest.

For the filming I went to Everest with my Dp (Director of Photography) Kishi Kentaro, but on May 21st, 2018, Kuriki Nobukazu died during his descent after deciding to abandon his attempt to continue climbing due to illness. I also came down with altitude sickness and had to be taken to the hospital via an air ambulance.

I’m still not sure if I can accept my friend’s death by making this film,...

Sosuke is a young manga artist who lives in central Tokyo. He has reached a dead end in his current work about a battle between a hunter and a Japanese wolf. He even attempts to look for traces of Japanese wolves in the mountains. One winter’s day at the construction site where he works part-time, Sosuke finds an animal skull and takes it home. Could it be a Japanese wolf’s skull? He goes back to the construction site at night to investigate further but meets Midori who is accidentally injured when looking for her dog. Spurred on by this meeting with Midori and her family, Sosuke gradually unearths the memories of the past war buried underground in Tokyo.

This is the second feature film for director Masakazu Kaneko following 2016’s The Albino’s Trees. He co-wrote the screenplay with Genki Yoshimura with a cast featuring Shô Kasamatsu (Mask...

Exclusive: Craig Plestis, the man who brought Korean format The Masked Singer to the U.S., has struck a deal with Japan’s Tokyo Broadcasting System Television to create unscripted formats for the U.S. and global markets.

The deal will see Plestis, who runs production company Smart Dog Media and executive produces Fox’s version of the mystery singing competition, and Tokyo Broadcasting System Television, the company behind Ninja Warrior and Takeshi’s Castle, jointly develop programming.

The pair will look to take advantage of the boom in Asian formats to create new shows that can build on the success of The Masked Singer and I Can See Your Voice.

Plestis is exec producing a U.S. version of I Can See Your Voice for Fox and Celebrity Show-Off for U.S. cable network TBS, which are both based on Korean formats, as well as The Masked Singer spinoff The Masked Dancer.

"Whoever wins this race... I shall grant them a wish." Signature Ent. UK has debuted an official trailer for the indie action thriller Samurai Marathon, also known as Samurai Marathon 1855. Inspired by a real-life race that is still held annually in Japan, Samurai Marathon is an epic thriller from the team behind 13 Assassins and The Last Emperor. It is actually directed by a British filmmaker named Bernard Rose, best known for directing Candyman and Immortal Beloved. Set in the late feudal era of Japan, a young ninja is operating undercover in the court of an aging Lord during a peaceful era of Japan. His loyalties are put to the test as he competes in the Samurai Marathon event. Starring Takeru Satoh, Nana Komatsu, Mirai Moriyama, Shôta Sometani, Munetaka Aoki, Ryu Kohata, Yuta Koseki, Motoki Fukami, Junko Abe, and Danny Huston. Featuring a Philip Glass score, which is also a...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Naomi Kawase's Still the Water (2014) is showing March 15 – April 13, 2019 in the United States as part of the double feature Love and Death in Japan.It’s been a little over two decades since Naomi Kawase emerged triumphant from the 1997 Cannes Film Festival with her Camera d’Or winning debut film, Moe no Suzaku. Since then the Japanese auteur has pivoted back and forth between fiction and nonfiction, but remains steadfast in her commitment to capturing the erotic undercurrents of the natural world, and how these elements unfold alongside personal reckonings, realizations, and tragedies. The recent success of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters—its institutional recognition at Cannes and in Hollywood marking the culmination of over a decade of critically-beloved trademark family dramas by the director—would seem to pit the two Japanese filmmakers against each other. Both are Cannes regulars,...

After dealing with the Roman Porno Reboot, doing the same with the Yakuza film was the reasonable path for Kazuya Shiraishi, whose career seems to be picking up during the last few years, with productions like “Twisted Justice”, “The Devil’s Path”, and “Birds Without Names”. Furthermore, his approach toward the Yakuza film, with a combination of Kinji Fukasaku’s aesthetics as dictated in the “Yakuza Papers” and the style of “Training Day”, seems to be the way for the genre to go from now on. Let us take things from the beginning though.

“The Blood of Wolves” is screening at Five Flavours Festival

The script is based on the novel “Korou no Chi” by Yuko Yuzuki and is set in 1988 in Hiroshima, prior to the enactment of the anti-organized crime law. Shuichi Hioka is the new guy in the East Kurehara precinct and is partnered up with Detective Shogo Ogami,...

The story of a nude dude who washes ashore and into the lives of four young documentary filmmakers, Kôji Fukada’s “The Man From the Sea” probably wouldn’t be of much interest beyond Asian audiences if not for the fact that its director earned the Jury Prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard for his previous feature, “Harmonium.” This featherweight follow-up — which feels almost like a live-action manga, more concerned with the romantic entanglements of its central quartet than with the magical stranger referenced in its title — doesn’t necessarily belong on the festival circuit but could attract overseas distribution by virtue of such exposure.

More splish than “Splash,” the movie wants to be a modern-day fairy tale — yet another mer-myth rippling in the wake of “The Shape of Water” — but remains frustratingly ambiguous about the nature of the enigmatic Japanese guy (Dean Fujioka) who stumbles out of the crystal-blue water in the opening scene.

★★★★☆ A contender for last year's Palme d'Or - if not the most deserving, according to its modest director - Naomi Kawase's Still the Water (2014) is a fluid, dreamlike tone poem of mothers and fathers, death and continuance. Violent waves crash on the shore of the film's Japanese island, sweeping to land the tattooed corpse of an unknown man. This event will subtly impact on the lives of two young teenagers who live nearby. Kyoko (Jun Yoshinaga) is a courageous young girl with a penchant for going swimming in her school uniform, even though the beaches are closed because of the discovery of the body. She, meanwhile, is gradually falling in love with the bashful, elusive Kaito (Nijiro Murakami).

Love, death and the raging sea are harmonised into a heady whole in this Japanese drama

Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s rambling rite-of-passage tale opens with a raging sea from which the tattooed body of a drowned man emerges; an accident or a crime? In the wake of this death, our attention turns to two teenagers standing uncertainly upon the shores of adulthood. Kyôko (Jun Yoshinaga) is the strong spirit who plunges into the ocean in her school clothes; Kaito (Nijirô Murakami) is a withdrawn boy who shuns the sea for fear of its “stickiness”. Both are dealing with separation anxieties about their mothers – hers is dying, his is “lecherous” – and both are gradually falling in love. This is a world in which a deathbed scene becomes a communal dance, and approaching storms are richly imbued with pathetic fallacy. At times it’s too schematic for its own good, but...

At the Cannes Film Festival last year, our Nikola Grozdanovic called Naomi Kawase's "Still The Water" "an enthralling coming of age story," and one that he thought might walk away from the Croisette with some kind of prize to put on the mantel. That didn't happen, but the picture is still one to keep an eye on as this lovely new trailer reveals. Starring Nijiro Murakami, Jun Yoshinaga, Miyuki Matsuda, and Tetta Sugimoto, the story kicks off when a teenager finds a dead body floating in the sea. Here's the official synopsis:  Read More: Review: Naomi Kawase's 'Still The Water' Is A Spectacle For The Senses On the subtropical Japanese island of Amami-Oshima, traditions about nature remain eternal. During the full-moon night of traditional dances in August, 16-year-old Kaito discovers a dead body floating in the sea. His girlfriend Kyoko will attempt to help him understand this mysterious discovery.

Still the Water

Written and directed by Naomi Kawase

Japan/Spain/France, 2014

Set on the Japanese tropical island Amami, Still the Water is a Zen-infused coming of age drama, exploring the personal revelations that come with life, death and love. Directed by the Caméra d’Or winner Naomi Kawase and selected to compete for last year’s Palme, it is a serene, contemplative film that comes alive in moments of harmony and rupture. Shot using primarily handheld cameras, Kawase casts a documentarian’s gaze over what develops into a quietly forceful narrative, allowing the exquisite setting to provide much of the visual flair.

When a heavily-tattooed naked body is washed up during the island’s traditional full moon celebrations, the budding relationship between teenagers Kyôko (Jun Yoshinaga) and Kaito (Nijirô Murakami) becomes closer but more complex. Kyôko, like the rest of the community, discuss the incident until it becomes old news,...

Coverage of International Sales Agents (ISAs) has resumed for the Toronto International Film Festival. This segment covers inspirational companies that have officially selected films in the festival. SydneysBuzz features ISAs, as they play an instrumental and necessary role in helping filmmakers to share their visions and voices with the world.

Paris based sales agent MK2 has the following films premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival this year:

"Still The Water", by Naomi Kawase

Cast: Nijiro Murakami, Jun Yoshinaga, Tetta Sugimoto, Miyuki Matsuda, Fujio Tokita, Drama – 116 min – Japan/France – 2014 – Japanese

On the subtropical Japanese island of Amami, traditions about nature remain eternal. During the full–moon night of traditional dances in August, 14–year–old Kaito discovers a dead body floating in the sea. His girlfriend Kyoko will attempt to help him understand this mysterious discovery. Together, Kaito and Kyoko will learn to become adults by experiencing the interwoven cycles of life, death and love.

From the award–winning director of "The Mourning Forest" (Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival 2007) and "Suzaku" (Camera d'Or, Cannes Film Festival 1997).

"Clouds Of Sils Maria", by Olivier Assayas Cast: Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz, Lars Eidinger, Johnny Flynn, Brady CorbetDrama – 123 min – France/Germany/Switzerland – 2014 – English

At the peak of her international career, Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous twenty years ago. But back then she played the role of Sigrid, an alluring young girl who disarms and eventually drives her boss Helena to suicide. Now she is being asked to step into the other role, that of the older Helena.

She departs with her assistant (Kristen Stewart) to rehearse in Sils Maria; a remote region of the Alps. A young Hollywood starlet with a penchant for scandal (Chloë Grace Moretz) is to take on the role of Sigrid, and Maria finds herself on the other side of the mirror, face to face with an ambiguously charming woman who is, in essence, an unsettling reflection of herself.

Learn about the MK2 slate here.

More about MK2:

MK2 is the first independent group of the French cinema industry (production, international distribution, exhibition, DVD publishing).More than 400 titles make up the MK2 library, which includes famous titles by international directors like David Lynch, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Michael Haneke or Abbas Kiarostami as well as films by the best French authors: Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, Jacques Doillon. MK2 also handles the rights of recent films by famous talents (Gus Van Sant) or emerging directors such as Xavier Dolan and Gela Babluani. In addition to that, MK2 restores in HD whole collections of classic films (Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton , Stan Laurel, H. Lloyd).

Still the Water

Written and directed by Naomi Kawase

Japan, 2014

Naomi Kawase’s particular brand of spiritual filmmaking reaches its most explicit point in Still the Water, a coming-of-age tale mixed with themes of love, death, and nature. Though it comes across as a story interested in exploration of big ideas through a humble sort of filmmaking, this wears Kawase’s pet themes on its sleeves and doesn’t hold back from finding ways to promptly shoving them in the audience’s faces. Because of this evident literalization, the film solely rides upon the execution of actions: dances, songs, and tears. Like the waves of its local beach, Still the Water rises and recedes, leaving it an enjoyable but infuriating mess.

Set on the southern island of Amami, in a village full of pacifists and mysticism, a dead, tattooed body finds its way to shore. The first to spot it,...

Cannes - If "masterpiece" is a word that critics should use with extreme caution -- never more so than at film festivals, where snap judgments are unavoidable but inflexible -- the same should probably go for the filmmakers under scrutiny. Naomi Kawase, the Japanese auteur arguably revered more by Cannes programmers than by anyone else, became a target of derision last week when she announced in an interview that her new film "Still the Water" is her "masterpiece," and that her eyes are firmly fixed on the Palme d'Or. Defenders pointed out the possessive qualifier she attached to the word: declaring a film one's own best work is different from branding it one for the ages. Either way, however, it was something probably best left unsaid -- and with the turgidly precious "Still the Water" now out in the open, it's harder still to believe. Perhaps enough of Kawase's pet...