Yukio Watanabe

Toward the end of World War II, middle-aged soldier Keita is entrusted with a postcard from a comrade who is sure he will die in battle. After the war ends, Keita visits his comrade's wife Yuko and bears witness to the tragic life she has led.

The 95-year-old director shot the film in his hometown of Ishiuchi, Hiroshima. The story is based on a teacher he had when he was a child.

Writer/Director Kaneto Shindô recounts his time spent in the Japanese Navy in WWII. He tells about the harsh training, grueling conditions, and tragic losses which are reenacted in black & white sequences.

About a family shouldering an unexpected responsibility when Alzheimer's disease strikes their grandmother. The superb cast portrays this serious and realistic situation with heart-warming compassion, stressing the importance of empathizing with the victims of this difficult disease.

The film is a series of vignettes from Taiji Tonoyama's life and film clips, interspersed with a dialogue to camera by Nobuko Otowa, addressing the camera as if she is addressing Tonoyama himself, recollecting events in his life. The film focuses on Tonoyama's alcohol dependence and his various sexual relationships, as well as his film work with Shindo.

Chinatsu and Kyoko are two close friends who live together and share pretty much everything, makeup, spoon and even their bed. They are so inseparable as to be almost a single entity. Yet they are neither a couple in the conventional sense, or in any other sense, since although Chinatsu is professedly gay, Kyoko is to all intents and purposes straight.

Young Wakana is the daughter of a husband and wife comedy act, who have worked together for 20 years without any big success. Wakana’s parents quarrel constantly, and her mother often threatens to leave. When one day her father disappears, Wakana sets out to find him.

It is based on the story of The Ballad of Narayama updated to the present day, with the substitution of putting a parent into an old people's home for the abandonment of the original. The film won the Golden St. George and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 21st Moscow International Film Festival.

A suspenseful story about an earnest and kind-hearted taxi driver who, by chance, turns into a violent murderer and races through the darkness of the city.

There still stands a famous apartment building where such prominent manga artists as Tezuka Osamu, Shotaro Ishinomori and Fujio Akatsuka once lived, worked, and shared experiences.

A retired actress whose husband has recently died visits her summer home. There she has encounters with old friends and acquaintances who bring various stories and news of death and the past

Filmed in a documentary style six patients in six wards of different ages and circumstances await death at a hospital in Japan. The sterile and dismal environment is contrasted against the emotional being of the patients, their visitors and relatives and the outside world, which they will never again survey.

A story of Japanese writer Kafu Nagai (1879-1959), a man about sixty with a huge reputation of seducer who falls madly in love for a young geisha named Oyuki. Meticulous and smartly dressed, Nagai patiently wrote in his diary his thoughts during many years. A melancholy reflection on the passage of time and a brilliant interpretive exercise.

Pinku from 1987.