DOWNLOADS

Also known as: For My Daughter's 7th Birthday. Many years following her mother’s suicide, Maya seeks out her father, who deserted them, for revenge. All intertwined with the investigation of journalists into local murders, the manipulations of a palmist known as the “blue moth”, and political corruption.

A trio of journalists receive a mysterious DVD from an unknown source. The young woman journalist decides to watch the DVD and disappears. Her two friends begin an investigation into her disappearance that turns up a video she shot while watching the DVD they received in the mail. Upon viewing it appears she was not alone in her apartment. Who is the mystery woman seen only in a reflection and what caused the young lady to commit suicide?

​A powerful priest uses his magical abilities to imprison the rain gods within a waterfall, causing a devastating drought. The imperial court sends a princess to his remote mountain retreat to seduce him and break his spiritual concentration.

A biting portrait of the world of classical Japanese dance: an ambitious young woman (Wakao Ayako) shoves aside her mentor (Kyo Machiko) on her way to the top.

After over 50 years of wandering up and down Japan, finally in the 1970s, the rough-hewn blind shamisen player and folk-song collector named Takahashi Chikuzan became a musical sensation. This biographical drama chronicles his wanderings and his life, with a particular focus on his humble beginnings as a peasant on a remote and arid island.

After a scandal breaks out among several students involved in the production of a skit, a lecturer at a South Korean women’s college brings in her uncle, a famous actor, to bring the work to fruition.

Jean Lerat begins his military service at an army camp. Despite his aunt’s attempts to pull a few strings to his advantage, the unfortunate Lerat manages to get on the wrong side of his bullying colonel…

A young pick-pocket meets a sheltered teenage girl at an art museum while trying to lift her wallet. He falls in love with her and lures her to deserted strip of beach where he pretends his stolen motorbike has broken down and they are stranded. An unlikely romance follows.

Sachiko has just committed a crime. She is helped by a couple to whom she grants her confidence. Quickly this couple blackmails her and threatens to deliver her to the police. Sachiko has no other choice but to obey them.

A film looking at the past to warn about the future, from a little boy's point of view. A companion to ‘American Dreams (lost and found)’ (1984)

*Shinjuku Mad* was one of
Koji Wakamatsu's six films from 1970. Grim and gritty, stark and steady, burdened with anti-moralizing, generously padded with sex, and totally redeemed by a soundtrack that needs to be released NOW. I knew nothing about this film, loading it up on to my laptop, and every last one of this film's sixty-sixty minutes kept me riveted.
Bear with me. The film opens with the band cycling through a jazzy rave-up, the black and images depict dead Japanese throughout a modern city. From the alleyways of the slums, to center of the park, you catch glimpses of bodies everywhere. This introduction is capped off by a lingering shot of a blood-soaked naked woman, face down. By this point, the band has reached a sort of peak. There's a cut, the band changes the direction of the song a bit, and then we're treated to a series of exterior shots from downtown, the lunch hour, maybe. You see a lot of storefronts and stairwells, people moving about. All of the people in these splices are done in negative image.
What follows can only be described as harrowing. After the credits, the reel switches to color. We're treated to the on-screen stabbing of a young man in a toga, his attackers strip his special lady-friend of her toga, spend about two minutes smearing her breasts with still-warm blood, and then take turns raping her. She doesn't seem to put up much of a fight. The scene is lensed with all of the enthusiasm of a television spot for a whole foods market.
Well, that's a fucked up way to start a movie. If you're still reading, I'll have you know the brutality eases up a little, but the camera's tendency to seek out each scene's more lurid details is relentless. The band never lets up, either. Another constant feature of the film is the protagonist's alienation from society. That's a pretty dated-concept, in a way. This film is cashing in on what could loosely be called the Existential demographic in 1970's Japan. Parts of it could have been written by Oe. Others by Mishima. It definitely, at times, addresses a bit of that lingering air of revolution, but more on that later.
The father of the kid stabbed in Technicolor shows up in the nest reel, in the same apartment his son was murdered in. This confused, grieving father asks a totally baked Shoko Asahara for information about the events leading up to his son's death. The long-haired no-goodnik is toking on a Sharpie-sized doobie. He gets so fucking high he passes out and the dad is left there in the empty apartment, getting a major contact-buzz.
So, the plot is basically that kind of exchange in larger and larger settings, intercut with glorious shots of the disillusioned father walking through industrial slums. The father, searching for the "Why" to his son's death goes on his quest and pisses just about everyone he comes into contact with off. He goes into subway stations and totally kills some beatniks' buzzes. Then he bullies a Hare Krishna ROCK AND ROLL SUPERSTAR and his belly-dancing percussionist at a park. Then he heads off to a bar, and we're treated to what must have been Tokyo's Greatest Garage Band getting low-down and sleazy here. This scene pretty much sums up what the film is about. As you dig the scuzz and the fuzz, the camera catches all manner of degeneracy and wanton reefer-use. And the bar has no less than three groups of people making out. And they get excessive with the groping.
Eventually, the father catches the ringleader of the vicious band of murderer-rapists. "Shinjuku Mad," is his name. After an unbelievably long and convoluted exchange between the protagonist and Shinjuku Mad, it comes out that Mad and the boys are rebelling against all of Japan. It's open season on everyone but them. His son was only a casualty, nothing personal. Their intent is to go on rebelling against society through random acts of violence against people and property.
After going through all the trouble of finding Shinjuku Mad, the old man's mind is blown by revolution for revolution's sake. After a few pummellings, he manages to turn the fight around. He winds up leaving with a nude girl that had been tied to a post for the entire scene.
He goes back to the apartment his son was murdered in to find his special lady-friend naked with six other dope-smoking cats grooving on free love and blue balls.
He decides he's happier with Shinjuku Mad alive and kicking, the band is at another one of its high points, and the camera pans out to the railroad yard, telephones wires, and the bare sides of modern buildings.
That was Japan, thirty-seven years ago.

The daughter of a wealthy family goes missing at the same time a mysterious dwarf is running around town scattering body parts in public areas.

A trio of young scientists investigate a source of uranium at the base of a sacred mountain, and after running over a dog, find themselves cursed by the locals.

After her mother runs away from home, Tomoko is raised to be a geisha. One day Tomoko meets her mother in a red-light district in Tokyo and her life deeply gets in trouble.

Pioneers of French feminist cinematic avant-garde, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki began their rebellious and most innovative exploration of the female body and identity, going by the evocative name of Cinéma corporel (Cinema of the Body), in 1975 with the film-manifesto Double Labyrinthe.
The two artists film one another in a series of portraits aiming at the visualisation of the subconscious through mysterious rituals, calling upon Ancient Greek and Egyptian archetypes. This mesmeric and purely feminine representation, exclusively filtered by the female gaze, not only deeply destabilises the dominant female depiction in the film medium, but also goes on to subvert the relationship between “filmer” and filmed.
As a consequence, the viewer herself – or himself – is invited to a radically unusual kind of engagement with the images. Double Labyrinthe demands to let us, the audience, be carried and transformed by its hypnotic and ritualistic series of unconventional portraits.

Having botched his entrance exams to a prestigious university, the dim-witted but earnest Hikoichi Otsu (Fujio) refuses to swallow his pride by doing the decent thing and admitting his failure to his mother back home in the country. His plight is made more desperate by a recently opened department store in his hometown threatening to engulf the family business and his father's dying words that without a degree one has no future in a rapidly modernising Japan. Not wanting to lose face, he just puts on his uniform anyway and turns up to his literature classes as if he were a bona-fide freshman. He looks sure to get away with his charade too, until a chance encounter with the leader of a group of student radicals named Soratani (Itami) throws him way out of his depth.

The story takes place in the sunset days of the yakuza in 1965. The postwar turmoil that created the black market and lubricated illegal business opportunities was giving way to Japan Inc. A young Bunta Sugawara takes over as the oyabun of a crime syndicate in Yokohama, where he is struggling to keep operations at the port there alive. As his syndicate is eroding quickly, a major heavy industries company offers his gang the chance to chase some vagrants out of a shantytown where they are squatting on land where a factory is to be built. The job would secure steady profits for Bunta's crime ring for years to come. However, Bunta and other members of his outfit grew up in the shanty, and they would be muscling their friends and neighbors. This sets the stage for an internal struggle that complicates the violent struggle with a rival mafia organization in Tokyo.

Charged with insubordination for punching a superior, Sergeant Kosugi is shipped to China in the last desperate days of the Second World War. His commander, Captain Sakuma, is vicious and dictatorial. Sakuma places Kosugi in charge of training for combat what once was the military band. Kosugi must somehow prepare his inept soldiers for the rigors of combat.

Teacher Yukiko finds herself in opposition to conservative faculty and villagers after defending a student for being in a relationship with a young man from Tokyo.

In The the film, Ernst Lubitsch plays Sally, the clever assistant to the detective Ceeps, who only succeeds in solving the Rosentopf case after some effort in the police farce. Partly lost.