"Hibakusha & My Journey" Dir. Takashi Kunimoto, 64 min, color, 2008 Synopsis "In his documentary film 'Traveling with Hibakusha: Across Generations,' Takashi Kunimoto focuses on the 'younger A-bomb survivors' who experienced the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they were babies or small children and so don't hold clear memories of their ordeal. The film is a record of a [Read more...]
UPAF 2011 Film #4 (Youth Program): "My Anthem" by MC NAM, 2010, Video. 4.5min. It is a music video for a song by a Vietnamese rapper MC NAM from Kobe, Japan. It is a cry of his soul about what it means to grow up as a Vietnamese in Japan, unknown facts of how his grandparents came to Japan... Shot on location in Nagata where he grew up. Camera by another Vietnamese high schooler in Japan. Edited [Read more...]
Duckling What is “Family”? What is “me”? As Japan’s communal family system collapses and families become more nuclear, the relationship between “me” and “family” shifts. We hear about so many incidents around the world every day, but the relationship between “me” and “my family” seems the most common problem. The massacre in Akihabara, the fatal stabbing of a father in Kawaguchi City by his [Read more...]
2009 Vancouver International Film Festival - Dragons and Tigers Award 2009 Hong Kong International Film Festival - Golden Digital Prize the 65th Venice Film Festival Directed by Emily Tang produced by Chow Keung, Jia Zhangke, Li Xiudong Synopsis: Two women cross paths at a turning point in their lives. Strangers and very different, yet somehow their pasts and futures may [Read more...]
Shot, Written, and Directed by Luciana Burlamaqui 150min. (Pt 1 & 2), Color, documentary, Brazil, 2009, In portguese w/ English & Japanese subtitles Festivals (Selected): 2010 International Cinema Festival in Guadalajara (Mexico)- The Best Latin American Feature Documentary 2009 The 4th Cinema and Human Rights in Latin America Show (16 cities in Brazil)- Audience Award for Best Feature [Read more...]
Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945 Dir. Erik Barnouw Camera: Akira Iwasaki, 16min. B&W, 1945/1970, 16mm film The earliest (and the only) film record of the immediate atomic bomb devastation was shot in September 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Japan Film Co., but was later confiscated by the U.S. Occupation Army. It was kept as a top-secret file until 1967, then for some bureaucratic [Read more...]
This legendary film became even more meaningful this year - after the mega-radiation leakage followed by the 3.11.disaster and the death of Yoshiko Tanaka, the actress who played the protagonist in this film. With the tribute to her life and the people described in the film, and also with the sense of warning to what's going on in the current Japan in mind, we will show it again. Hirosuke [Read more...]
”The Cats of Mirikitani”『ミリキタニの猫』by Linda Hattendorf 74 min U.S.A. Eighty-year-old Jimmy Mirikitani survived the trauma of WWII internment camps, Hiroshima, and homelessness by creating art. But when 9/11 threatens his life on the New York City streets and a local filmmaker brings him to her home, the two embark on a journey to confront Jimmy's painful past. An intimate exploration of the [Read more...]
KURAYOSHI, 2010, 24 min, color In this work, Tomomichi Nakamura, an Okayama native painter and animator, departs from his signature animation style as seen in his previous works such as "Ant" and "My Town," and explores a new path using the "real" images. Synopsis Nakamura stayed in Kurayoshi, a typical unspectacular provincial city of Japan, for a week, and assembled all kinds of images [Read more...]
Onkalo (Finnish for "hiding place") is under construction: it's a cavernous world of tunnels and corridors, a permanent storage facility for nuclear waste, meant to last 100,000 years (that's 20 times as long as the pyramids have so far). Conceptual artist Michael Madsen's film is a creepy, eerily elegant meditation on human folly, punctuated by philosophical and historical references, [Read more...]