Holy Theater

The Stormy Times is a collection of three short films created as a series of visual poems (Dream Running, Grasshopper’s One-Game Match, andWe Can Hear Joe’s Poem). Katsu Kanai screened this films together, along with extra documentary footage, as a memorial to his friend Jônouchi Motoharu.

A popular poet, Goku, becomes depressed when his editor jokingly suggests that he is a sell-out.

A young man reaches adolescence and escapes the nunnery where he survived a tortured upbringing; the world outside suddenly seems even more frightening than before.

Eri Manaka lives alone in the big city. She writes a romantic novel on impulse and is startled when it gets rave reviews and makes her a literary celebrity. But doubts soon kick in, and Eri begins work on an anti-romantic sequel, in which her heroine Rie goes through the torments of the damned.

A young man murders his new bride and goes insane. He wakes in an asylum with no memory, left in the hands of two mysterious doctors who relate his condition with his biological identity.

An aphasic young boy living in South Korea meets, on one of his regular paths, a “Koguryo Beauty” who shows him how to trace his heritage.

A unique film in which an elderly man creates miracles in his daily life by playing the leading role himself. The film depicts the process of creating a mysterious world that transcends reality through the act of filming and leads to a surrealistic conclusion.

A five-part documentary chronicling Toshio Matsumoto, the legendary filmmaker known as a pioneer of experimental cinema in Japan and also active as a film theorist, who exerted a profound influence on innovative film expression from the 1950s onward. Directed by filmmaker and critic Takefumi Tsutsui—himself both a filmmaker and critic like Matsumoto—the project was filmed over the course of ten years. Interweaving excerpts from Matsumoto’s works with an extensive series of interviews with collaborators and critics, the documentary retraces, through the figure of Matsumoto, the tumultuous decades from the 1950s to the 2000s across five parts, totaling 700 minutes.