Takaharu Yasuoka

A quiet killer is looking for a room. The real state agent, shy and expressionless, guides him through Tokyo, towards the ruins the decadent economy has left behind, in hopes of finding The Room.

December 1989, director Katsuyuki Hirano took on the journey of biking across Hokkaido under extreme weather. This is the documentary about that journey.

Kenzo Okuzaki, a 62-year-old veteran of the New Guinea campaign in World War II, sets out to conduct interviews with survivors and relatives to find the truth behind atrocities committed by Japanese military, in particular the unexplained killing of two Japanese privates in his unit.

In the slums of Osaka, various marginalized misfits have their own interpretations of love. Completely alienated from the outside world, they commit sexual perversions, violence and cannibalism.

The director was already in Baghdad to cover the U.S. air raids when they began in March 2003. Shouting in front of a U.S. Army tank, he portrays the real situation that befell the Iraqi civilians. As he shows how different families fall victim to heavy air raids and the horrors of war, he questions the “meaning” of war.

In July 1988, Mizue Furui was in the Gaza Strip and West Bank with her camera as a rookie freelance journalist. Covering the Palestinian condition, she became acquainted with Ghada Ageel, a 23-year-old teacher at an elementary school, in November 1993 and started shooting her life up to when she turned 35. The 12 years Furui spent shooting still and video images has borne fruit in a documentary titled "Ghada -- Songs of Palestine," which will be released in Uplink Theater in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, in May as a rare report on women in the traditionally male-oriented Palestinian society.

Roughly chronological, from 3/96 to 11/96, with a coda in spring of 1997: inside compounds of Aum Shinrikyo, a Buddhist sect led by Shoko Asahara. (Members confessed to a murderous sarin attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995.) We see what they eat, where they sleep, and how they respond to media scrutiny, on-going trials, the shrinking of their fortunes, and the criticism of society. Central focus is placed on Hiroshi Araki, a young man who finds himself elevated to chief spokesman for Aum after its leaders are arrested. Araki faces extreme hostility from the Japanese public, who find it hard to believe that most followers of the cult had no idea of the attacks and even harder to understand why these followers remain devoted to the religion, if not the violence.

A2 is a continuation of director Tatsuya Mori's film A (1998), an incredible view inside the compound of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult after its leaders carried out the deadly sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995. Most followers had no idea that the attacks were being planned, or even that their new religion had violent aspirations. After the attacks, these followers were left to rebuild the religion where they had once found peace in the face of overwhelming, and understandable, condemnation from the rest of Japan. Central focus is placed on Hiroshi Araki, a young man who finds himself elevated to chief spokesman for Aum after its leaders are arrested. Araki faces extreme hostility from the Japanese public, who find it hard to believe that most followers of the cult had no idea of the attacks and even harder to understand why these followers remain devoted to the religion, if not the violence.