News

“Shinji Somai’s films have the power to change and sustain your life,” said Ryusuke Hamaguchi. One of the great retrospectives this year thus far was that of the Japanese director, presented by NYC’s Japan Society. His eclectic work is well-deserving of discovery and now Cinema Guild is bringing two of his gems to wider audiences, Typhoon Club and P. P. Rider. The former, winner of the Grand Prix at the first Tokyo International Film Festival in 1985, will be opening on September 8 at IFC Center and now a new trailer has arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “Typhoon Club is widely regarded as the seminal film of director Shinji Somai’s career. A work of raw, elemental power, it follows an ensemble of junior high students in a provincial town, beset by a summer-y malaise as a typhoon looms in the air. When the storm makes landfall, the teens hole up in their school unsupervised,...

From the late ’50s and into the 1970s the Japanese New Wave exhibited an incredible creative outburst that defined and shaped what we consider contemporary Japanese cinema. But most studious critics have labeled what came after, the 1980s, as the “lost decade” of Japanese filmmaking, where no major directors or movements came to the forefront in either the home country or worldwide. Nevertheless, there’s been a recent surge of reconsideration of that period, mainly through retrospectives and restorations, like the one put together by Japan Society on Shinji Somai, one of the most important, eclectic directors who got his start in that epoch.

“Rites of Passage: The Films of Shinji Somai” features seven of the director’s early features, made between 1981 and 1990, which cemented his style. As the name of the retrospective and its accompanying description by its programmers hint, Somai cut his teeth into the seishun eiga (youth film) genre,...