Echoes

Soon after he lands in America, Ali, a Muslim man from Pakistan, begins his search for his estranged wife, Nadia. On his journey, Ali meets with Teppei, a Japanese traveller hitchhiking his way across America, and Sarah, a local trailer park girl, who help him in his search. The three travellers succeed in finding Nadia, who, to Ali’s dismay, is living a new life in Phoenix with another man. Ali spends the rest of his stay in America with Teppei and Sarah, anxiously wondering where his life is leading. In the brief time they are together, the three companions commit to helping one another. Ali, Teppei and Sarah begin a new journey, to find their own individual identities and in the process they find each other. Big River is a road movie, a tale about the borderless realm of friendship and its ability to transcend culture.

Many people have forgotten what happened in Fukushima.

Little Towa lives with his parents Satsuki and Yuichi in a coastal town on Nagashima. Yuichi is a fisherman, Satsuki runs a restaurant. What Towa doesn’t know is that he is adopted. As a baby, he was abandoned in an internet café, completely emaciated. While his new parents are secretly fighting for custody of him and want to protect him from his past, the family’s happiness begins to falter. Satsuki and Yuichi aren’t the only ones who are worried about Towa’s future.

Double revenge in two separate stories. Set in both a near future and the historical past, revenge is served not by violence, but by love.

A woman working as a hotel receptionist was harassed by her superior. This docu-fiction depicts sexual harassment affects not only the victim and the perpetrator, but everyone around them.

After the 11 March 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, residents of Futaba, a town in Fukushima Prefecture, are relocated to an abandoned high school in a suburb of Tokyo, 150 miles south. With a clear and compassionate eye, filmmaker Atsushi Funahashi follows the displaced people as they struggle to adapt to their new environment. Among the vivid personalities who emerge are the town mayor, a Moses without a Promised Land; and a farmer who would rather defy the government than abandon his cows to certain starvation.

Deep in the Valley interlaces a story of young romance set in Yanaka (part of old downtown Tokyo) with a Japanese period drama based on Five-Story Pagoda, a classic literary work by Rohan Koda. In the contemporary story, Kaori, a young woman working for a non-profit organization that restores home movies, learns that there used to be a five-story pagoda in the middle of Yanaka Cemetery. It burned down in 1957, and rumor has it that someone has an 8mm film of the fire.

Industrial Hitachi City is the location for this post-3.11 drama. Still recovering from the tsunami, Shiori receives news of her husband’s accidental death, which marks the start of a personal recovery that mirrors the town’s for Shiori as well as forgiveness of surviving coworker Takumi.

Launched in 2011 as a sister group to girl band behemoth AKB48, the Osaka-based NMB48 has become a musical force itself. With a string of No.1 hit singles and albums, not to mention sell-out performances, NMB48 continues Japan’s pop-music phenomena. Director Funahashi Atsushi, whose documentary work has previously chronicled such harrowing events as the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, pulls back the curtain on the life and struggles of the band members and the workings of the idol-making industry.

Japan has a recidivism rate of 50%. The staff at a magazine called CHANGE want to lower that by rehabilitating former prisoners. This forms the basis of FUNAHASHI Atsushi’s ensemble docudrama, which tells the story from both the perspectives of the editorial team and ex-cons.

Documentary celebrating the life and work of Yasujiro Ozu, fifty years after his death.