JAPANESE DIRECTORS LISTED

In the immense city of Tokyo, the darkness of the afterlife lurks some of its inhabitants who are desperately trying to escape the sadness and isolation of the modern world.

A secret military project endangers Neo-Tokyo when it turns a biker gang member into a rampaging psychic psychopath that only two teenagers and a group of psychics can stop.

1973 film by Kinji Fukasaku

In the final months of World War II, 14-year-old Seita and his sister Setsuko are orphaned when their mother is killed during an air raid in Kobe, Japan. After a falling out with their aunt, they move into an abandoned bomb shelter. With no surviving relatives and their emergency rations depleted, Seita and Setsuko struggle to survive.

1985 OVA film by Mamoru Oshii

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

1955 film by Mikio Naruse

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

A man keeps his girlfriend tied up in his small apartment and tortures her. She is undressed, subjected to various types of bondage, whipped, and tortured with a razor blade.

A man gets rid of a cheap pot without knowing it contains a map to a treasure. As word spreads, many join in hunting it.

An umbrella maker with a shopping addiction finds himself in dire straits when his debts force him to consider selling his attractive, desirable daughter to a suitor she doesn't love.

Ayako, a young woman from a rural fishing village, is sold by her family into a brothel when her father takes ill. There, she is quickly stripped of her innocence and illusions.

A man who works late hours at a deadening job lives together with his wife and his younger sister. The younger sister's a modern girl who's starting to receive romantic attention from one of her co-workers.

1954 film by Keisuke Kinoshita

Also known as Kôya no Dacchi waifu (Dutch Wife is slang for an inflatable sexdoll). A private detective is hired to find a woman who has apparently been murdered in a snuff film. It turns out the woman's not dead, but very much alive, and he gets sucked into a torrid affair with her that leaves him questioning his sense of reality.

The first Japanese feature-length animated film. It was directed by Mitsuyo Seo, who was ordered to make a propaganda film for the war by the Japanese Naval Ministry. Shochiku Moving Picture Laboratory shot the 74-minute film in 1944 and screened it on April 12, 1945. It is a sequel to Momotarō no Umiwashi, a 37-minute film released in 1943 by the same director. It is black and white. The whole movie also depicts the Japanese "liberation of Asia", as proclaimed by the Government at the time. Seo tried to give dreams to children, as well as to instill the hope for peace, with hidden movie's hints of dreams and hopes, under the appearance of war propaganda.

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.

A Japanese woman writes down three stories she has witnessed or heard of in her diary, each about the difficult situation a young woman finds herself in.

The bittersweet events in the lives of people in Hakodate, a regional city connected by a streetcar network. A laid-off man and his younger sister go up a mountain to see the first sunrise of the year. Meanwhile, Haruo has inherited his family's gas business, but things aren't going well in his new endeavor and he becomes increasingly frustrated.

A teenage goldsmith with a dark past tragically falls in love with a young nude model.