Be Still, My Beating Heart

The film introduces a number of haunting ghost photos submitted by viewers, and explores the shocking truth behind them. The many frightening images that cannot be seen directly will surely shake all viewers to their very core.

Natsu spends a last summer alongside his friends, Aki, Fuyu and Haru, while writing a stage play to commemorate their time together. Shot entirely on 8 mm film, Kohei Sengen’s feature-length debut, with its grainy images steeped in muted colors, creates an almost dreamlike atmosphere, conveying the melancholy of growing up and growing apart.

Kanji, who is employed at a nuclear power plant, begins to lose his grasp on reality after a fatal accident at his workplace. As he roams through nature, his personality gradually changes. An atmospheric black and white horror film, narrated at a slow pace by director Yu KAJINO about the invisible impact of radioactivity on human beings.

18-year-old Hikaru has just graduated from high school and she has travelled alone from Niigata to Tokyo to meet the father she has never known without telling her mother. Her parents originally met in Shinjuku but after parting, her mother Mayumi left the city and gave birth to and raised Hikaru alone while her father Naohide stayed put and became a scriptwriter of a hit TV romance drama. Despite being able to imagine and write moving works of fiction, the reality of having an illegitimate child leaves him bewildered and, out of guilt, he tries to get involved in Hikaru’s life again while balancing responsibilities to his current girlfriend and avoiding upsetting Mayumi.