Hikaru Hayashi

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.

A mother and daughter are stranded in small, isolated cabin, and are starving to death. In order to survive, they plan to entice men that happen to stray to their cabin with sex, and kill them. All goes well until a local cop shows up and, then, an old relation.

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.

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 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

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.

A documentary about the lives of actors in the Sakura-tai theatrical troupe, which had arrived in the island of Hiroshima to begin preparations for the staging of a play just before the atomic bombing.

Haru, an aging scriptwriter, has isolated himself somewhere in the woods of Nagano to work on his first novel. As the last surviving member of his kin, he intends to chronicle the family he grew up in.

Takeshi Yasui, a junior high school student is found dead in a river. The police investigate it as a murder related to bullying. The dead boy turns out to have been murdered by two of his schoolmates, who he had been bullying.

Internationally acclaimed for his cinematic realism and social commitment, Kaneto Shindo based the story of THE HORIZON on his sister's experiences. The film concerns Hideo, a young girl who leaves Japan in 1920 to settle her family's debt by being sold in marriage to a Japanese farmer in San Francisco. Over the next 20 years the couple works hard and raises 4 children. After Pearl Harbor is attacked they are interned with other Japanese immigrants in a camp, losing both their land and their assets. Hideo has now been uprooted twice and has to adjust to her son's going to war and her daughters' post-war assimilation and marriage to Americans despite her protests. But Hideo is a survivor and she awaits a new immigrant from Japan with hope.

Kleptomaniac Sonoko and young, beautiful Mitsuko begin an unusual love affair which develops fast into a kinky sexual love triangle when Sonoko’s husband gets involved.

O mundialmente famoso pintor de madeira Hokusai (1760-1849), um viúvo que precisava de uma renda estável, mora com a sua filha Oei na casa do seu amigo de infância Bakin. Katsushika Hokusai foi um artista japonês, pintor do estilo ukiyo-e e gravurista do período Edo. Na sua época, era um dos principais especialistas em pintura chinesa no Japão.

The men who surround and torment the young protagonist (demanding teacher, owner of the company that rapes his own daughter, despotic and uncompromising father) are opposed to women (victims of men) as embodiment of salvation.

Akiyama is an intern, disgusted with the noise pollution caused by the bullet trains and the heart attacks that noise has been causing in older hospital patients, plots to disrupt and, in ten days, destroy a unit of the operation. He warns the Japan National Railway, that, if nothing is done to reduce the noise, he will derail a bullet train. Takigawa is the police detective sent to stop him.

Bakyo is a talented but unsuccessful rakugo artist. The very successful Rokyu wants to take Bakyo under his wings, but Bakyo refuses, claiming that Rokyu's rakugo is compromised by the elements of kabuki. But Bakyo changes his mind and determines to learn (or steal) Rokyu's craft and makes it his own.

Based on a true story, an elderly woman resiliently spends nine months attempting to retrieve her husband's dead body, fighting government bureaucracy and indifference all along the way.

Adaptation of Natsume Soseki's classic novel in a modern setting.

The story tells of the adoration of Sasuke for his mistress, the blind samisen-teacher Shunkin, who treats him imperiously and subjects him to cruel beatings.

A young woman undergoes psychiatric treatment after she no longer hears music and develops sexual hang-ups.

A woman takes revenge on her husband after he leaves her for a younger woman by harassing the couple with unwanted phone calls at night.

A war widow determined to clear the name of her disgraced husband, who was court-martialed for desertion and executed. Official records have been destroyed, and the ministry that distributes benefits continues to deny her a pension. Twenty-six years after the war, she seeks out four survivors of her husband's garrison. Each tells a dramatically different story about her husband's conduct, but she is determined to learn the truth.

A little girl tries to sell matches on a cold December night with no luck. To keep from freezing she lights one match and sees a wondrous vision...

Michio Yamada, a recent school graduate, is sent to Tokyo to work as a fruit-packer in a department store as part of a government programme. He takes a gun from a house on an American base and uses it to kill several people. The scene changes to Yamada's childhood. Yamada is born the child of a reprobate and a weak-willed woman. As a boy Yamada, experiences poverty and the rape of his sister at first hand.

Tatematsu Minoru, a yakuza belonging to the Ishikawa group that runs the Shinjuku area, has a beautiful sister named Akane. He dreams of sending her to college and turning her into a perfect young lady. He's extremely fond of Akane. His fondness for her goes beyond how he feels about his mistress, Kanae. And yet, Akane feels alone. Now, a new tutor comes into her life that seems to have taken a liking to her...

This Japanese melodrama chronicles the exploits of a geisha's beautiful daughter. The daughter is the geisha's pride and she spares nothing to insure that she has a bright future. But the hard-working young woman's dreams of becoming a dressmaker are shattered.... She then becomes a nightclub hostess who plays cards with male patrons using her body as the prize.

Otowa is a former Seto Inland Sea island farmer who has moved to the mainland in order to find work, but instead ends up dead. The film begins with the discovery of her corpse, which leads to an investigation that uncovers the narcotics, prostitution, and murder in which many poor farmers had found themselves trapped after World War II.

Michi's first encounter with Nobuyuki Ishida, secretary to the chairman of a private school, takes place in the drawing room, when she attempts to swindle him out of two million yen for alleged rape by his son. Akie (Kyoko Kishida), Ishida's wife and the chairman's daughter, offers her a million, but he gives her what she demands. Now Michi is not only satisfied, but she has a mad desire for Ishida and calls him every day asking for a date. His sympathy for her gradually evolves into love, and he soon allows her insatiable passion to strip him of his decency.

O filme é inspirado em um caso real. No outono de 1966, um casal com dois garotos praticou várias vezes uma vigarice que consistia, primeiro para a mãe e depois para o filho mais velho, em atirar-se contra automóveis, simular atropelamento e contusões e, assim, extorquir dinheiro dos automobilistas, ameaçando-os com queixa à polícia.

The entangled relations between the son of a seductive tea-ceremony teacher and the women in his father's life. Based on the novel by Kawabata Yasunari.

Um escultor cego obcecado por uma modelo, a aprisiona em seu ateliê. Acreditando ter criado uma nova forma de arte tátil, ele e a modelo se envolvem numa alucinada e sadomasoquista relação, entre o erotismo, arte e a morte.

A Yasuzō Masumura film about a love affair starring Ayako Wakao. The literal title is The Two Who Got Wet.

Three students spend their holidays at the seaside where they are mistaken for Koreans, a minority which is looked down on in Japan. The action develops into a crime story.

In the Sengoku period, a woman and her daughter are raped and murdered by soldiers during a time of civil war. Afterwards, a series of samurai returning from the war through that area are found mysteriously dead with their throats torn out. The governor calls in a wild and fierce young hero to quell what is evidently an Onryō ghost. He encounters the two beautiful women in an eerie, beautiful scene. After spiritual purification, he meets the demon in a thrilling fight.

A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next.

The disturbing story of a physician who conducted the first operation with general anaesthetic, and the women in his life who are both so determined to win his love that they volunteer as subjects for his experiments

A sex-obsessed young woman, a suicidal young man she meets on the street, a gun-crazy wannabe gangster—these are just three of the irrational, oddball anarchists trapped in an underground hideaway in Oshima’s devilish, absurdist portrait of what he deemed the “death drive” in Japanese youth culture.

aka Libido.

Four sexually hungry high school students preparing for their university entrance exams meet up with an inebriated teacher singing bawdy drinking songs. This encounter sets them on a less than academic path.

A young boy joins a band of ninja during a peasant uprising, all depicted through an experimental form of filming pages from the original manga set to sound.

A girl is in love with two men.

Taka, the daughter of Naniwa-ya, a longtime Osaka store owner, married Kichisaburo Kawashima-ya, the son of a kimono wholesaler. Her husband just tried to play with her like a sweet candy, but Taka fell in love with him. One day, the father-in-law suddenly dies, and the Kawashima-ya family fortune is rapidly changing. However, the depravity of Kichisaburo does not subside...

A well-respected drama teacher confesses to his housekeeper that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima has left him impotent. With the coming of spring, the sympathetic housekeeper suggests that the Master observe the Yobai , a custom in which the young men of a village steal into the bedrooms of susceptible women to have sex.

Two young women must come to terms with the fact that a man they're deeply linked to is a murdering rapist.

A young Japanese woman comes to Peru to marry a man she has never seen in this somber drama highlighted by cultural differences. Her husband is a first-generation Japanese and both are bound to the time-honored tradition of arranged marriages. Bringing her child from a previous marriage, she finds her new husband living with Andes Mountain Indians and working for an archaeological expedition. The man and her boy take to each other, and the woman begins to study and understand the lives of the Indians. When her husband is killed mining for Incan treasure, she uses the money sent by the state to stay and help the villagers whom she has come to love.

Tashiro coincidentally meets his best friend Sugimoto in a bar very close to the apartment in which Sugimoto’s wayward wife is found dead. Although Tashiro is not a suspect in the police investigation, he is racked with guilt and confesses to his wife, Masako. In an effort to further relieve his tortured sense of guilt, he then confesses to Sugimoto. Neither his wife nor his friend can believe that he could have been involved.

Uma mulher sedutora é sequestrada para a prostituição. Depois de fazer uma tatuagem de aranha nas costas dela, ela inicia a sua vingança, deixando vários homens pelo caminho.

Provincial 14th century governor Moronao, attracted to the wife of a court magistrate, tries to seduce her and when she rejects his advances plots to send her husband into battle.

When her only relative, her elder brother is accused of robbing and murdering an old woman loan-shark, pretty, young Kiriko travels from her home in Kyushu to Tokyo to get Japan's top lawyer to defend her brother. Unfortunately her naive idealism is shattered when the lawyer refuses to take the case based on her insufficient funds. What follows is a long determined revenge plot that sees the heroine become a Tokyo bar hostess and worse to punish the lawyer. The plot thickens with another murder mystery and a sleuthing reporter.

A headstrong young man seeks to join the Shinsengumi, but while his determination impresses his superiors, questions begin to arise as to his true identity and intentions.

Século 14, Japão. Esperando o filho que está na guerra, uma mulher e sua nora sobrevivem em uma aldeia através de tocaias que armam para alguns soldados, matando-os e vendendo seus pertences. Com a morte do filho, a mãe põe em prática um plano diabólico para manter a companhia de sua nora.

Osaka in the early 1600s, aftermath of the historical Battle of Sekigahara; a group of orphan children are wandering through the battlefield scavenging for armour when they encounter a young boy named Sasuke with magical powers he says came from a meteor that crashed onto the Earth…

A divorced woman enters a marriage arranged by her mother in exchange for money to save the life of her seriously ill son.

Experienced shipyard worker Shimazaki gets an offer of free lodging from his employer in the company seaside rest house if he agrees to see to its running. After moving in, Shimazaki finds out that this will also mean taking care of a flock of youngsters, and he soon becomes their none-too-successful warden. At work the boys are disciplined, as soon as they return to their dormitory however they turn into an unmanageable mob.

A tale of two best friends in the WWII era Japan. Takao is a young man enthusiastic about joining the navy to fight for his country. He convinces his best friend Shinji to join him. As it turns out, however, Takao's poor health prevents him from entering the navy while his friend is chosen instead. As time goes by, Takao becomes a painter and changes his mind about the meaningfulness of war and fighting, while his friend goes the opposite path. Meanwhile Takao's sister falls in love with Shinji.

The supply of sea bream to the fish market has decreased, and the price has increased to a whopping 1 ryo, and unable to face his customers openly anymore, Tasuke closes the shop and goes on a trip to celebrate the first wedding anniversary with his wife Onaka. Staying at the inn, Tasuke sees that dishes from magnificent sea bream are served here, which is very cheap. Tasuke goes to a fishing village and finds out here that a rich merchant is stopping the shipment of fish...

Story of a resourceful hobo (Kobayashi), a con woman (Takamine) who pretends to be a victim of the Nagasaki A-bomb, and two orphaned children who become a most atypical Japanese family.

The ship Kaijin Maru is left adrift after losing all means of navigation in a storm. The four people on the ship are becoming increasingly desperate as food and water run out.

Yoshida’s first big-budget production and colour film is a haunting tale of unrequited love and postwar disillusion. The story of the fatal attraction between a spineless intellectual and a strong woman is conventional, but its enactment is radically new.

The basic story in Love under the Crucifix is about Ogin, daughter of a tea master, who are both Christians in feudal Japan. Ogin falls in love with a feudal prince, also a Christian who is already married, and that creates problems. Further, when the Shogun bans Christianity, the situation worsens.

1962 Japanese movie

A leading postwar Japanese film critic and theorist who co-founded the seminal film magazine Eiga Hihyo (Film Criticism) in 1957, Eizo Yamagiwa made his directorial debut with this independent feature—long thought lost until a negative was recently discovered—about a group of idle bourgeois students known as the “Roppongi Tribe” (Roppongi zoku). Depicting the resignation and nihilism of the postwar generation in the years following the Anpo Treaty conflicts through a coming-of-age narrative, Yamagiwa offers sharp criticism of the prevalent characterizations of Japan's new youth offered by Nikkatsu's taiyozoku (“Sun Tribe”) films and the New Wave at large.

In the late 1950's prostitution was banned in Japan and if a woman was found exercising this profession they were sent to a reformatory. This is a story of one of these brave women Kuniko who is released from the reformatory and tries to build a new life.

An opportunistic department store clerk gets involved with three women and attempts to manipulate them so he can move up the social ladder.

Satsuo Yamamoto's filmic depiction of the famous 1949 Matsukawa Incident.

The story is of two people. One is deaf, the other deaf and mute. They marry after meeting at a school reunion, and the film follows their trials and tribulations ... and joys.

A family of four are the sole inhabitants of a small island, where they struggle each day to irrigate their crops.

It's a story of the life of a man who advocated the necessity of sex education to children, which was unusual at the time, solely opposed to the amendment of the Peace Preservation Law, and was assassinated by a rightist prior to his opposition speech.

An employee in an assurance company threatens to commit suicide when management announces a massive layoff, the company uses this threat to its own advantage by turning the incident into an advertising campaign. With the success of the campaign, however, he is no longer a desperate man pointing a gun to his head, but a potential leader who wishes to take advantage of his failed suicide.

The Chase after Opium Dealers

Based on the Seichō Matsumoto's story The Woman Who Took the Local Paper.

A year ago, Tetsuo Yazaki was unemployed and wanted money, attacked a police box in Kobe, robbed a policeman of his pistol, attacked Hamamatsu OS Theater and Nagoya Shinwa Bank, and succeeded in robbing a large amount of money.

Drama which shows the struggle of Fumiko, a female teacher, at work and at home.

Focuses on the mutual antipathy of two groups of children in an Izu village.

An ageing fishing boat, Dai-go Fukuryu Maru ("Lucky Dragon No. 5") sets out from the port of Yaizu in Shizuoka Prefecture. It travels around the Pacific line fishing. While the ship is near Bikini Atoll, the ship's navigator sees a flash. All the crew come up to watch. They realize it is an atomic explosion, but take time to clear their fishing gear. A short time later, grey ash starts to fall on the ship. When the ship returns to port the sailors have been burned brown. They unload the fish, which are then transported away. They visit the local doctor and then go to Tokyo for an examination. It turns out they are all highly radioactive. Their symptoms become worse, and the contaminated fish causes a panic.

A lifetime story of a woman who stubbornly lives in a poor mountain village in post-war Japan.

Asako, a former telephone operator once heard the voice of a murder suspect which has continued to haunt her. Years later her husband invites his boss, Hamazaki, over for dinner and she realises his voice is suspiciously like that of the killer. Before she can investigate further, Hamazaki is found dead and her husband becomes the prime suspect.

Nobuo is a hot-headed hoodlum fresh out of reform school who struggles to make a clean break with his tearaway past.

Based on the story by Kenji Miyazawa in which two hunters get lost in the woods and discover a strange restaurant which makes a number of increasingly strenuous demands.