Writes Ando, "Oh! My Mother was the first work I made using a newly bought 16mm camera I had purchased with the writer Shuji Terayama in Paris. This piece was selected for the Oberhausen International Film Festival. In 1969, there were, of course, no video cameras like ones we see now, and color TVs were only found at broadcast television studios. I had just been employed at the TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System), and I often snuck into the studios after hours to experiment with the equipment. Oh! My Mother was made using the feedback effect, which is produced by infinitely expanding the image by looping the video."
1969-03-27
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7.0A butcher whose meat is most tender, surrounded successively by ephemeral and delightful cashiers.
7.4A man ran into a woman on a street. She was not attractive, but was a perfect girl for him. After missing the chance to talk to her, he contemplates on how he should have approached her.
7.7On a planet far away, a primeval creature gets banished by the chief of its tribe. Exiled and with the burden of a disgraced honour, it sets foot into the unknown land beyond its home, where it finds an intriguing alien concept to take vengeance.
6.8An untidy room. Empty beer tins, empty wine bottles, a half-empty glass of whisky... A girl is getting up absent-mindedly and starts preparing herself. YOUR morning starts. Lazy and hard-to-wake-up YOU. The emoticon is ME watching over YOU. I play tricks on YOU, while YOU are playing the guitar and drinking. One day, in town, YOU walk past THE CHILDHOOD FRIEND who is buying an Anemone I liked, and remembering that I liked them, YOU rush out to buy them. THE CHILDHOOD FRIEND displays the Anemone with care. One day, years after I died, YOU hear noise from the closet. Opened, YOU see MY garden right in front of YOU. Overflowing emotions of ME and YOU. When exiting from the room with memories, a picture of the Anemone that YOU painted is displayed in YOUR new room.
0.0In this drama, Lesia convinces her English-Canadian friend Sarah to perform a Ukrainian dance with her as part of their school's Christmas pageant. Sarah's father, angry at the growing number of Ukrainian settlers, won't allow his daughter to participate. Despite the prejudices of their parents, the girls' friendship remains strong, and they meet in Sarah's barn to celebrate Christmas Day together. Part of the Adventures in History series.
10.0As the only flower Yağmur has on her balcony, a peace lily starts to fade away, her friend tells Yağmur an old myth: Peace lilies cannot blossom when they are alone. Yağmur and the flower start to share the same path when they both blossom out of their loneliness.
6.8Lourdes, a university student, is grateful to Bernard, the town drunk, when he comes to her aid in an uncomfortable situation. But when she offers to buy him a hot meal, she ends up getting involved in far more than she bargained for.
7.1Owen, after a sleepless night from his Mothers funeral the day before, decides to avoid his father and visit her grave. Through a misunderstanding he meets Maura, who's visiting her recently deceased Father's grave. Together they try to find a way to connect with the loved ones they've lost.
5.0A ghost story about a modern English farm haunted by the ghost of its former owner. It's rumoured that he murdered four children, but it is slowly revealed that they were child labourers who died in various accidents exacerbated by his carelessness.
0.0Danaji, a farmer from the state of Maharashtra in rural India, is accompanied by his eight-year old son Ganya to the city to sell his onions at the Mandi (market). While the child is enamoured by the sights and sounds of the place, the farmer has to fight a Kafkaesque battle to find the right price for his produce.
5.5A young man is anguished that Koreans cannot volunteer to join to Japanese Imperial Army.
0.0The outsider Katrine survives a school shooting and is the only one to see who the shooter is. The hunt for the boy begins, and slowly Katrine realizes that she has more in common with him than any of her other classmates.
7.4Two lost souls visiting Tokyo -- the young, neglected wife of a photographer and a washed-up movie star shooting a TV commercial -- find an odd solace and pensive freedom to be real in each other's company, away from their lives in America.
Two brothers, one of whom suffers from a traumatic brain injury, struggle to survive on their own.
Dong-chan dreams of selling clothes in Shanghai after saving up enough money by working in a warehouse in Dongdaemun. Ji-pyung met a Chinese woman named Mei Mei while working and introduced her to his brother. On the day after Mei Mei went to Shanghai, Ji-pyung was called by his boss. He was confronted about helping Chinese people imitate clothing patterns. In order to save his brother, Dong-chan used all his savings and found his boss who was in a karaoke bar.
5.0Animated adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe 1839 short story The Fall of the House of Usher, a work of Gothic fiction that includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.
8.0Henry Chen and Junho Tan, the stars of His Cat, jointly perform the short story fragments of gay lovers.
It was a hard struggle Mina, the little lace-maker, had with the world, supplying the needs of herself and her crippled little sister. An expensive brace was necessary. There was only one way left. Mina decided to sell her hair. So her romantic young landlord bought it. Of course, being human, we know the end, but Mina didn't.
6.0A secret agent investigates the death of the scientist who created a deadly ray only to find out his own wife is involved.
7.7Tokyo schoolgirl Hiromi and her friends engage in a practice known as enjo kosai, or "compensated dating", where older men pay young girls for dates. Hiromi plunges deeper into this world to raise money for an expensive ring.
6.2On a whim, a greedy tycoon decides to corner the world market in wheat. This doubles the price of bread, forcing grain producers into charity lines and others further into poverty. The film contrasts the differences between the lives of those who work to grow the wheat and the life of the man who dabbles in its sale for profit.
7.5A director faces creative block while working on his latest film – a reimagination of his adolescence growing up in a mountain village in rural Japan.
6.0A submissive hooker goes about her trade, suffering abuse at the hands of Japanese salarymen and Yakuza types. She's unhappy about her work, and is apparently trying to find some sort of appeasement for the fact that her lover has married.
6.5The story follows the social intercourse between a cameraman, Masaya, with a visual impairment, and Misako who disconnects from the world.
7.2Operating out of the movie capital "Nyallywood," Pompo has been shooting one B-grade entertainment flick after another that anyone would enjoy. One day, Pompo's "movie buff" assistant Gene spots a new script written by Pompo and is moved by its exquisite story. In a fit of passion, he proclaims, "I want to see this as a finished work in theaters as soon as possible!" However, Pompo tells him, "So you shoot this film." Thus, Gene takes on his first directing gig. Meanwhile, Natalie, an ordinary girl who just arrived in town with movie actress dreams, has been discovered by Pompo...
7.1Aya Okamura has been working for two years and has begun living on her own for a job opportunity. With her mother working overseas as a doctor, her father is now living alone with the family's longtime pet cat Mii-san. One night, Aya returns from a long day at work, and as she rests on her bed, she reminiscences about the times the family had together. She remembers the sadness she felt when her mom went overseas, and the solace she felt when her father brought home Mii-san to give her comfort. Then, she receives a phone call.
6.6An aspiring young filmmaker gets involved with an eccentric gangster for the financing of his first film.
7.2An urban legend says that lighting fireworks at an abandoned airfield will beckon the "summer ghost," a spirit that can answer any question. Three teenagers, Tomoya, Aoi, and Ryo, each have their own reason to show up one day. When a ghost named Ayane appears, she reveals she is only visible to those "who are about to touch their death." Compelled by the ghost and her message, Tomoya begins regularly visiting the airfield to uncover the true purpose of her visits.
7.0Across different eras, a poor family, an anxious developer and a fed-up landlady become tied to the same mysterious house in this animated dark comedy.
6.7Kyôko, a traumatized young Japanese girl, finds herself struggling with her self-confidence in her adult life. Growing up in a family without her mother and her sister, she constantly questions the rationale of sex and the notion of liberty in modern Japanese society.
7.2Subu makes pornographic films. He sees nothing wrong with it. They are an aid to a repressed society, and he uses the money to support his landlady, Haru, and her family. From time to time, Haru shares her bed with Subu, though she believes her dead husband, reincarnated as a carp, disapproves. Director Shohei Imamura has always delighted in the kinky exploits of lowlifes, and in this 1966 classic, he finds subversive humor in the bizarre dynamics of Haru, her Oedipal son, and her daughter, the true object of her pornographer-boyfriend’s obsession. Imamura’s comic treatment of such taboos as voyeurism and incest sparked controversy when the film was released, but The Pornographers has outlasted its critics, and now seems frankly ahead of its time.
6.3A young Japanese woman named Yoko finds her cautious and insular nature tested when she travels to Uzbekistan to shoot the latest episode of her travel variety show.
6.3Takeshi Kitano plays a version of himself in which he's a struggling director cycling through a number of different genres in an effort to complete his latest project.
7.5A spell of time in the life of a family in rural Tochigi prefecture. Yoshiko is not an ordinary housewife, instead working on an animated film project. Uncle Ayano, a successful music producer, is looking to get his head together after living in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Sachiko is concerned with why she seems to be followed by a giant version of herself. As the lazy days pass by, each member of the family is followed in a series of episodic vignettes.
7.3Two interwoven stories. The first is a biography of anarchist Sakae Osugi which follows his relationship with three women in the 1920s. The second centers around two 1960s students researching Osugi's theories.
7.3Barefoot and her friends decide to make a samurai movie, gather a unique cast and staff for the production, and try to screen it at their school festival.
6.5The seven short films making up GENIUS PARTY couldn’t be more diverse, linked only by a high standard of quality and inspiration. Atsuko Fukushima’s intro piece is a fantastic abstraction to soak up with the eyes. Masaaki Yuasa, of MIND GAME and CAT SOUP fame, brings his distinctive and deceptively simple graphic style and dream-state logic to the table with “Happy Machine,” his spin on a child’s earliest year. Shinji Kimura’s spookier “Deathtic 4,” meanwhile, seems to tap into the creepier corners of a child’s imagination and open up a toybox full of dark delights. Hideki Futamura’s “Limit Cycle” conjures up a vision of virtual reality, while Yuji Fukuyama’s "Doorbell" and "Baby Blue" by Shinichiro Watanabe use understated realism for very surreal purposes. And Shoji Kawamori, with “Shanghai Dragon,” takes the tropes and conventions of traditional anime out for very fun joyride.
6.2During the night shift in a colony greenhouse, a botanist does her best to contain suspicious soil samples that have alarmed her sensitive lab dog.
6.6The story of two brothers, Tom and Jake, and their problematic relationship.