Kei Shichiri

Gōzō Yoshimasu is one of Japan’s leading poets, still prolific into his ninth decade. This film documents his 2019 performance of Se (‘back’), a live poetry reading set against accompaniment from avant-garde rock group Kukan Gendai. Blindfolded and wearing a facemask, Yoshimasu plays audio recordings, growls and rasps his way through a rendition of a poem, and channels every ounce of his energy into drawing, using a pane of glass as his canvas. Kukan Gendai sculpt shapes of sound in response: an entire universe thrown into sharp relief by an uncompromising contest between voice and music.

Deconstruction of the Daughter of Salome

For the film’s 10th anniversary, experimental filmmaker Kei Shichiri (DUBHOUSE, JAPAN CUTS 2015) presents an all-new sound and image remastering of his tour de force film (formerly translated as Before the Day Breaks). Based on a manga by Naoki Yamamoto, the film follows Aochi, who sleeps and sleeps but never feels like she has slept enough. Shichiri, who explores the limits of sound and image in his diverse body of work, presents a highly evocative dramatic film in which humans barely appear on screen. The story is told through voiceover, sound and visions of dreams and landscapes. Over the years, the film has gained fans, including contemporary auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who compared the film to those by Jean-Luc Godard. -JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film

TheForbidden pure love story, based on the original work of Junichi Watanabe. Chitani Moriya is an ordinary 25-year-old office worker who is driven by a marriage desire.

TheForbidden pure love story, based on the original work of Junichi Watanabe. Chitani Moriya is an ordinary 25-year-old office worker who is driven by a marriage desire.

A young woman works as a waitress in a diner. Her relationship with her boyfriend is unfulfilling and to further complicate things she is obsessed with a large hemangioma, or benign vascular tumor, on her hip (one that we actually never see). One day after she encounters a mysterious man wearing a hood and playing a clarinet she discover a small shack built out of cardboard. She crawls into it and suddenly we are transported to this young woman's interior world, a place where she meets her own doppelgänger in the form of a large doll who bears the same birthmark on her hip.

When three older men buy a 17-year-old schoolgirl named Chikako for a year's-worth of sexual services -- her motivation, aside from money, is never explained -- the relationships among the men (whom she calls A. B and C) keep shifting in ways that redefine power and sex.

A young man writes a novel about his forbidden love with his sister, who works overtime in the office on a holiday. Based on the manga of the same name by Naoki Yamamoto, and covering the manga's inspiration source, Juro Kara's "Anjuko's Shoes" and Ogai Mori's "Sansho Dayu".

A young man writes a novel about his forbidden love with his sister, who works overtime in the office on a holiday. Based on the manga of the same name by Naoki Yamamoto, and covering the manga's inspiration source, Juro Kara's "Anjuko's Shoes" and Ogai Mori's "Sansho Dayu".

The best must be the freshest. The best sake also follows the same principle to brew in which it needs the best and freshest raw materials, and also the freshest virgin to make it? Visiting one of a Japanese pub that seems to offer the best warm sake, Mononobe tries to follow the steps to reproduce the same flavor. However, he suddenly found out that those flavors are actually a combination of sake, sweat, and other bodily secretions of a virgin. As his only daughter is not a virgin anymore, the only way to make the best sake without a pure virgin is...