Aki and Naoko are childhood friends who are drifting apart as adults. Immersed in her family life, Naoko now has a husband and daughter; Aki, on the other hand, remains single and is on leave from work due to a personal crisis. The plot might sound familiar but it has never been told like this. The director Kusano Natsuka stages the interactions through an actors’ table-read and, as the lines are repeated, the scenes gradually develop into on-location conversations. Moreover, she repositions the dramatic peak of the story to the beginning: Aki has murdered Naoko’s daughter.
Structurally inventive, Kusano's daring cinema implements ‘distantiation’ effects to get to the heart of friendship issues at times when life has settled. While the repetitions convey the suffocation of role patterns in both friendship and family, a line left out or added in unsettles and reminds us life can take unexpected turns.

十九世紀はじめ、鎖国下の日本。開国を望む蘭学者の一派が、幕府管理下にある日本地図の写しを密かに完成させる。彼らはオランダ人にその地図の写しを渡すため、若い蘭学者の道庵（森岡龍）を密使として送る。身を潜めながら、人気のない冬の山を進む道庵だが、高山（渋川清彦）をはじめとするその山の番人たちは、幕府が手配した道庵の人相書を手に山狩りを始めていた…。

Japan, 1944. Trained for intelligence work, Hiroo Onoda, 22 years old, discovers a philosophy contrary to the official line: no suicide; stay alive whatever happens; the mission is more important than anything else. Sent to Lubang, a small island in the Philippines where the Americans are about to land, this role will be to wage a guerrilla war until the return of the Japanese troops. The Empire will surrender soon after; Onoda, 10,000 days later.

長編2作目の「Playback」（2012）が劇場公開された三宅唱監督が、10年に手がけた長編第1作。12月の札幌、高校卒業を間近にひかえたテツオらは、先輩の伊丹が勤める警備会社に通いはじめ、仕事の役に立とうと車の運転を教えてもらうが……。北海道の荒野を背景に、若者たちの切実な一瞬を美しいモノクロームの映像できりとった青春映画。

Ryota Nonomiya is a successful businessman driven by money. He learns that his biological son was switched with another child after birth. He must make a life-changing decision and choose his true son or the boy he raised as his own.

With a contagious sense of abandon, three young adults' lives become intimately entangled over the course of a long summer in Hakodate, Hokkaido.

In 1930s Korea, a swindler and a young woman pose as a Japanese count and a handmaiden to seduce a Japanese heiress and steal her fortune.

2018 Japanese film