News

“Good Luck” began as a short film, part of the Beppu Short Film Project created to promote the city and Oita Prefecture. Eventually, however, Shin Adachi, best known as the writer of “100 Yen Love”, expanded it into a feature by adding a rather quirky meta layer to the narrative.

Good Luck is screening in Far East FIlm Festival

Taro Yoshiyama is an indie filmmaker who has recently completed a film about his girlfriend and sponsor, Yuki, which has received an honorable mention at the Beppu Film Festival. Despite his reluctance to attend the screening, Yuki convinces him to go. During the event, however, the festival’s director and programmer publicly criticizes him, essentially stating that she invited him only out of curiosity about the lack of direction in his movie. Devastated, Taro begins wandering the area, where he is repeatedly approached by a strangely energetic girl named Miki, who...

Stars: Mutsuo Yoshioka, Seiichi Kohinata, Hana Amano, Junpei Yasui, Koji Seki, Giko | Written and Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

With a lengthy filmography under his belt, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has made himself known as an exciting director with many contributions to Japanese horror. Three of his films are currently slated for release in 2024, yet it will be a surprise if either of the remaining two are stronger works than Chime.

In order to support his family, former chef Takuji Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka) has taken up a teaching job for the time being. While he aims to fill his classrooms with a calming atmosphere, that is disrupted by the strange actions of a student, Tashiro (Seiichi Kohinata). Acting as though he is in a trance, the student claims that he can hear a chime which he desperately wishes to escape the grasp of. Soon enough, Matsuoka also begins hearing the chime.

As the inverse to Matsuoka’s classrooms,...

It is one of the many recurring themes within Japanese literature and film to expose the hidden layers of the world and of people. With a distinct nod towards the works of writers such as Frank Kafka, Haruki Murakami, arguably the most famous writer from Japan, has made a career of stories revolving around the idea of the dark aspects of a person which we either did not know about or simply chose to ignore for quite some time. In a society as homogenous as the Japanese, you might be inclined to see the appeal of this concept and how it is rooted within the nation’s culture. In his feature debut, “Mari and Mari” director Tatsuya Yamanishi follows a similar approach, following the story of a man whose sense of security and stability comes crumbling down on him as the person he loves becomes someone he does not recognize anymore.