My Voiceless Friends

Homeland

Jiro Sawada is a sophomore in high school when a false accusation drives him out his hometown: a small village in Fukushima Prefecture. The entire village is abandoned after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, but Jiro returns there to live. Before long, members of his family come and join him.

Wenn die Heide blüht

Dead Angle

Elite college graduates commit perfect financial crimes though loopholes in the law during the 1950s.

I Live in Fear

An aging foundry patriarch, gripped by terror of nuclear annihilation, tries to uproot his family to Brazil. When they petition to have him declared incompetent, a family-court counselor witnesses his obsession slide into ruin—and asks whether ignoring the atomic threat is any saner.

Pigs and Battleships

In the city of Yokosuka, Kinta and his lover Haruko, both involved with yakuza, brave the post-occupation period with a goal to be together.

Apart from Everything

After a two-year absence and a recent stint in rehab, Fran returns home to Toronto. Struggling to live soberly for the first time in her adult life, she must face the emotional fallout of her disappearance and make amends with the girlfriend and the brother she left behind.

Down Town

A woman struggles to raise her young son on her own in postwar Japan, finding companionship with a kind laborer while still hoping for the return of her missing husband.

Good Morning

A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of inter­generational relationships, Good Morning tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists. Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic I Was Born, But . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.

Early Spring

A young salaryman and his wife struggle within the confines of their passionless relationship while he embarks on an extramarital affair.

House of Bamboo

Eddie Kenner is given a special assignment by the Army to get the inside story on Sandy Dawson, a former GI who has formed a gang of fellow servicemen and Japanese locals.

Ulysse est revenu

Madadayo

In postwar Tokyo, beloved writer-professor Hyakken Uchida retires and is buoyed through hardship by the fierce devotion of his former students, who honor him each year with a raucous “Not yet!” birthday toast. Told in warm, gently comic vignettes, Kurosawa’s farewell celebrates aging, friendship, and the sustaining ritual of teacher and pupils refusing to say goodbye.

The Return of the Native

Eustacia Vye, an exquisite beauty despairing at her boring life on an English moor, sets up a fateful lovers' triangle when she uses her wiles to entice two men, a dashing suitor and a successful man who made his name abroad and returned to his home on the heath.

Mother

A neurotic, twice-divorced sci-fi writer moves back in with his mother to solve his personal problems.

Remember the Night

Unexpected love blossoms when an assistant district attorney agrees to take a recidivist shoplifter home so she doesn't have to spend Christmas alone in jail.

Kabei: Our Mother

Set in Tokyo in 1940, the peaceful life of the Nogami Family suddenly changes when the father, Shigeru, is arrested and accused of being a Communist. His wife Kayo works frantically from morning to night to maintain the household and bring up her two daughters with the support of Shigeru's sister Hisako and Shigeru's ex-student Yamazaki, but her husband does not return. WWII breaks out and casts dark shadows on the entire country, but Kayo still tries to keep her cheerful determination, and sustain the family with her love. This is an emotional drama of a mother and an eternal message for peace.

Sayonara

Air Force Major Lloyd Gruver is reassigned to a Japanese air base and is confronted with US racial prejudice against the Japanese people. The issue is compounded because a number of the soldiers become romantically involved with Japanese women, in defiance of US military policy. Ordinarily, a by-the-book officer, Gruver must take a position when a buddy of his, an enlisted man, Joe Kelly, falls in love with a Japanese woman, Katsumi, and marries her. Gruver risks his position by serving as best man at the wedding ceremony.

Akitsu Hot Springs

Just after WW2, a romance between an innkeeper and a man with tuberculosis unravels near a thermal spring.

Medicine River

When photographer Will returns home for his mother's funeral he gets more than he bargained for from a strange cast of characters on the reservation.

Girl's Reform School

The day to day life in an establishment for delinquent teenage girls.