Shogo Ueno

Based on webcomic “Musicophilia” by Akira Saso published in 2011, this is a film about Saku Urushibara, a young man with a special ability to understand sounds in nature. His father is a prominent composer, and his younger half-brother is a genius music composer. Due to the success achieved by his father and half-brother, Saku Urushibara has an inferiority complex. He tries to stay away from music because of this, but he ends up enrolling at the University of Arts in Kyoto where his special ability helps him find his own voice in the world of contemporary classical music.

A Distant Cry from Spring (TV Movies)

After her parents divorced, Shima Sumitomo lived with her mother. She felt uncomfortable living with her stepfather and she was unable to hang out with people at her high school. Shima Sumitomo decides to move to Hokkaido where her father lives. At her new high school in Hokkaido, she meets classmate Gen Tatebayashi and Wao Sakurai. They are the two most popular boys at her school. A principle of her school is that "Gen and Wao are for everyone." If anyone breaks the rule, that person will be ostracized. Even so, Shima Sumitomo gets closer to Gen and Wao.

A depressed widower, a bored housewife, and a gay lawyer all intersect in this triptych of love lost.

Film in the second group of works from the hands-on filmmaking academy Cinema Impact, produced by director Yamamoto Masashi with the participation of 13 up-and-coming directors. An ensemble comedy that adapts a theatre piece performed in 1997 by director Hashiguchi Ryosuke, whose renowned films include All Around Us and Hush!. An aspiring filmmaker visits a film production company the day before a shoot is scheduled to begin. The tangle of participants includes a stylist, a producer angling to raise cash, and an assistant director scrambling to fulfil crazy demands.

The movie features a tragic love story involving three main characters and spanning two decades. Lin plays an exchange student from Shanghai named Yue Lin. Ikeuchi plays a ski patrol member she meets in Yubari, Hokkaido.

University student Keisuke returns to his hometown during his summer holiday and takes a part-time job at a run-down movie theater. However, his boss Ruka, a projectionist who lives on the premises, has not set foot outside in three years, and always falls into a deep depression on Mondays. Keisuke feels himself becoming attracted to the mysterious Ruka, but...

A college student in Hakodate, Japan lost her best friend 10 years ago. Since the tragic loss the girl hasn't talked. One day, the girl is asked to write a comment about a "forget-me-not" on a website. She writes about letting go of the past and to focus on the present day. Soon after however a man resembling her childhood friend appears in her life.

Akari Yoshiyama is graduating high school soon and is expected to lead new life after she passes the university entrance exam, while her mother is working as a pharmacologist. However, her mother has a car accident and the situation is totally changed. She decides to go to 1972 to fullfil her mother's wish.

Shiro's struggle with his father's cancer and impending death leads to a realization that he must communicate his love and admiration for him before it's too late. A series of flashbacks reveals their relationship over time, and the trouble Shiro faced connecting to his strict father who was also his teacher and soccer coach. With a consuming secret of his own, Shiro, now in his late twenties and about to get engaged, must eventually learn how to share the pain of it with his loved ones.

At a high school in the city of Yokohoma the baseball team trains to go to the top. There are struggles, hardships and successes and not all of it is due the star pitcher or batter and those in the centre of attention. There are rewards to being the great, but it is a long way to the top and they know it.

Kanao, a courtroom portrait artist, observes crimes, scandals and the decline of Japanese values without passing judgement. As he and his wife endure the tragedy of their first child’s death, hope slowly unfolds and their love story flickers to life once again.

Kaoru, Hiroki and Takeshi are childhood friends. Adults now, they have gone their separate ways, but still live close to each other in central Tokyo. Hiroki works for a newspaper company, and Takeshi has followed in his father's footsteps to work at the Tsukiji fish market. Both men love Kaoru, but Hiroki is too shy to express it. Finally, Takeshi proposes to her, and she accepts. On the day of their engagement party, Takeshi crashes his car and becomes comatose. After three years, Takeshi comes out of his coma - but with no memory of his engagement.

Shinji (Shinichi Tsutsumi) steps out of a train station to find himself transported back to 1964.

2004 film

After finally passing his teacher's exam, Miwa (Yukiyoshi Ozawa) devoted himself to teaching in a rustic primary school. He struggles to get through to his students, until he creates a class project to raise fireflies to fly over it once again. All students, even the reserved girl Hikari (Risako Sugaya), become passionately involved in the project. However, it brings them into conflict with parents and the school, one problem after another stands in his way.

Heaven's Bookstore is a 2004 Japanese film directed by Tetsuo Shinohara about a struggling classical pianist who is sent to heaven to work in a bookstore. It is based on two novels, written by Atsushi Matsuhisa and Wataru Tanaka.

In a small town on the countryside, where everyone knows everyone, all the children pay their respect to the middle-aged woman who runs "Barber Yoshino". An old tradition is rooted in this town. Every young boy is forced to have the same ridiculous hairstyle to have their bangs cut straight, known as the "Yoshino-gari" hairstyle. Of course they all get their hair done at the only barbershop in town, "Barber Yoshino". Then one day, a drastic change occurs when a transfer student with bleached hair comes from Tokyo....

Working long hours in the emergency room, nurse Kana Aoshima befriends musician and frequent hospital patient Shogo Amami. Shogo's therapy visits for his muteness and blindness happen to frequently coincide with Kana's shift, which enables the nurse to get to know the handsome artist well enough to start falling in love with him. Fate intercedes, however, when Shogo is killed after being hit by a car - a development that utterly crushes Kana's will to live. Shogo's spirit is transported to heaven, where it is given the chance to return to Earth to assist Kana through her grieving and to renew her sense of faith in the world - with the only caveat being he cannot reveal his identity to Kana.

Twelve year old Sei has hit puberty and is quickly becoming sexually aware, sometimes not as privately as he'd like; erections in school and other inopportune times plague him. He talks about it with his school friends, Kinta and Nyanko, in between their feuding over the affections of classmate Yumi, but can't figure out what to do about it.

In her brother's apartment where he died, Yuki finds a vacuum cleaner with its cord still hooked up to the outlet. She discovers that the circumstances surrounding her brother's supposed suicide are sketchy at best, yet no one has any answers. When she starts having hallucinations involving his ghost, however, she seeks some psychological help, eventually uncovering some things that she may have wished she'd left covered.

Naoya and Katsuhiro are boyfriends, new in their relationship. Things are uneven at first—Naoya is open and free while Katsuhiro is cautious and closeted—but nothing compares to the chaos that arrives when Asako, a troubled woman with a history of psychiatric problems, abortions, and casual sex, asks Katsuhiro to conceive a child with her.

The fourth chapter in the Love Cinema series, is a story of a cloistered and obsessive character who is confining and closed. When many suicides occur in an apartment building the police are by to question a female resident.

Kizaki, who moved to Tokyo from the Kansai region to become a manga artist, is assigned to work at a used electrical appliance store where he works part-time as a store keeper and repairman. One day, a woman comes to the store drenched from the rain. She is Setsuko, the only daughter of the store's president and a returnee. Since then, Setsuko often comes to the store. Kizaki becomes concerned about Setsuko, but Setsuko has something to do with Oshi, a senior who used to work at the store...

A romance that takes place one summer in the countryside between an out-of-job musician, Hanabi (Masayoshi Yamazaki), and a girl, Hibana (Masumi Sanada).

A coming-of-age story. Shuji, a Japanese teen, is falling in love with his friend Hiroyuki, however, Hiroyuki is attracted to Kasane, the new girl in their class.

OV version of the comic "Summer Memories" based on Naoki Yamamoto. Kawanaka (acted by Takuji Suzuki), who was arrested in another case, started talking about the murder school girls. Detective Kuroda is gradually at the mercy of Kawanaka's madness...

The members of the Ameya family are all scammers. After their election scheme goes bust in their hometown, they move from Shikoku to Tokyo and resume their fraudulent activities. Everything carries on smoothly until the eldest and the fourth sons' modus operandi go awry, the mother's lover runs off with another woman, and disasters strike one after another. This film is a collaboration between Yoichi Sai and Goro Kishitani following "All Under the Moon." The family business of the Ameya family is defrauding people. The matriarch, who keeps getting married and divorced, has five children with different fathers. The Ameya family chases after fortune and leaves a trail of trouble on their path.

The first theatrical film by film critic Yoichi Ogino. Yayoi has a lover named Yataro, but she is not sure if its working. Strange things start to happen...

Two young men cut grass in what appears to be a huge countryside park. The younger, more butch one is a pro; he does this every day. The other, slightly nerdy and clumsy with the equipment, is a temp; he wants to be a writer. The day starts badly, but they reach a truce during lunchbreak. And then, in the afternoon, they drift towards - what? Emotional intimacy? Sex? A glimmer of mutual understanding? Shinohara's prizewinning short shows the collision of two personalities, two approaches to life, and yields some moving and curiously melancholy perceptions of the world as young men see it. A minor classic of Japanese indie cinema.

A man on his way home from a wedding. When he wakes up drunk, he finds himself in a park in the early morning. As he wanders the city in the early morning, he meets a girl on a mountain bike and is suddenly chased by the police instead of the girl. The camera, which had been following the lazy, fresh morning air, turns around and starts running away with the man. The police chase him relentlessly. As he struggles to outrun his pursuers, he finds himself becoming increasingly elated. As he runs, he finds himself becoming more and more elated, as if it is the start of a journey away from the boredom of everyday life. The camera work is superb, eloquently capturing the man running with all his might.