JAPANESE DIRECTORS

Kimiko, a Tokyo white-collar working girl, lives with her serious, intellectual, haiku-writing mother. Kimiko seeks to marry her boyfriend but needs her absent father to act as the go-between and negotiate the marriage. Kimiko travels and finds her father living with a second family.

1949 film by Yasujiro Ozu

1965 film by Yasuzō Masumura

1954 film by Kenji Mizoguchi

Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.

A Man Vanishes examines the concept of Johatsu, tackling the phenomenon of people missing in Japan over the years. It picks one such person from the list, someone who had seemed to disappear from the face of the earth due to embezzlement from his company, and the filmmakers begin an investigative documentary into the reasons behind and attempt at tracking him down.

In Depression-era Japan, a courteous bus driver carries an eclectic group of passengers from the mountainous Izu to Tokyo.

A young girl, Chihiro, becomes trapped in a strange new world of spirits. When her parents undergo a mysterious transformation, she must call upon the courage she never knew she had to free her family.

High schoolers Mitsuha and Taki are complete strangers living separate lives. But one night, they suddenly switch places. Mitsuha wakes up in Taki’s body, and he in hers. This bizarre occurrence continues to happen randomly, and the two must adjust their lives around each other.

After Japan's defeat in the war, the Anjo family lose their peerage and wealth. Since their mansion is due to pass into the hands of a creditor, the family holds one last ball before leaving.

1969 film by Masahiro Shinoda

Two interwoven stories. The first is a biography of anarchist Sakae Osugi which follows his relationship with three women in the 1920s. The second centers on two 1960s students researching Osugi's theories.

1997 anime film directed by Hideaki Anno

In the future, the Japanese government captures a class of ninth-grade students and forces them to kill each other under the revolutionary "Battle Royale" act.

1968 film by Nagisa Ōshima

Taking its title from an archaic Japanese word meaning "ghost story," this anthology adapts four folk tales. A penniless samurai marries for money with tragic results. A man stranded in a blizzard is saved by Yuki the Snow Maiden, but his rescue comes at a cost. Blind musician Hoichi is forced to perform for an audience of ghosts. An author relates the story of a samurai who sees another warrior's reflection in his teacup.

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

1969 Japanese drama film directed by Toshio Matsumoto

A bus making its precarious way across a winding mountain road picks up some unwelcome passengers.

About Tadashi Yoshimura's maternity clinic where he practice "natural births" deep in the forest of Okazaki (Japan).