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Zatoichi
Zatoichi is a blind traveller who makes his living as a gambler and masseur. But behind this lowly façade is a master swordsman blessed with lightening-fast skill and precision. The eponymous anti-hero wanders into a mountain village controlled by ruthless gang-leader Ginzo. Zatoichi hears the story of two geishas whose parents were murdered by the Ginzo…
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Spirited Away
Ten-year-old Chihiro Ogino becomes separated from her family in an abandoned amusement park that turns out to be a portal to the spirit world. This celebrated masterwork from Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki was a huge hit worldwide. It marked a pivotal point both in the growing popularity of Japanese anime and the wider acceptance of…
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Ping Pong
A comedy drama about two boys obsessed with ping pong not an obvious first film choice for a director but the result is an exhilarating, manga-influenced film, as much about Japanese society, winning, losing and teenage friendship as table tennis. Peco (Kubozuka) and Smile (Arata) play two chalk and cheese friends who enter the same…
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Yojimbo
Sanjuro (Mifune), a wandering samurai (rōnin), arrives in a small town where competing crime lords vie for supremacy. After proving his skill as a master swordsman by swiftly dispatching three thugs, the two bosses each seek to hire the newcomer as a bodyguard, with a view to eradicating their opponent and securing control of the…
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Departures
In 2009 this moving but often humorous film cleaned up at the Japanese Academy Awards and won Japan the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Masahiro Motoki (Longest Night in Shanghai, 2007, Bird People in China, 1998) won several Best Actor awards for his outstanding performance as an unemployed cellist who moves with his wife from…
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Still Walking
In a film about feelings, Still Walking covers a day in the life of a modern Japanese family with traditional values at its core. The family reunites once a year to commemorate the death of the parent’s favourite son. He died saving another boy from drowning. For the second son, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), the gatherings…
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Tokyo Story
Voted number 1 in the 2012 Sight & Sound directors’ poll, this gentle tale focuses on a small town Japanese couple, played by Chishū Ryū and Chieko Higashiyama, as they reflect on changing family values and relationships in post-war Japan. With their children scattered to Tokyo and Osaka, and too busy with their own lives…
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Like Father Like Son
Ryota has worked hard for everything in his life and he thinks nothing can stop him from pursuing a perfect life. Then one day, he and his wife Midori, receives a phone call from the hospital. A blood test shows that their son is not theirs, that the hospital made a mistake when their son…
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Our Little Sister
Just as in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son (Palme d’Or in Cannes 2013), this is a family drama, but now with a focus on the relationships between sisters. Three of them are living with their grandmother as they have long been estranged from their parents. Their father left them to live with another woman.…
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Tampopo
A lone truckdriver Goro (Yamazaki) arrives in a small town and stops for noodles. They’re not great and his remarks about the noodle bar’s mediocrity triggers a brawl with locals. A thoroughly thrashed Goro is invited by the restaurant hostess, Tampopo (Miyamoto, Itami’s wife), to help her make her noodles the best in town. Goro’s…
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