Love Fantasia

A Full Life

A woman becomes dissatisfied with her marriage and joins a political theater troupe to protest the U.S. Security Pact.

Children Hand in Hand

The film centres around a group of schoolchildren navigating the complexities of friendship, trust, and honesty. At its heart is a thoughtful and suppressed boy with a learning disability whose interactions with his classmates oscillate between evoking tenderness and triggering aggression.

Il paradiso dell'uomo

The story of the Japanese woman who with a sense of pagan fatalism has been able to sacrifice herself to mechanize her spirit in a sort of absurd voluntary human planning: of the woman who knows how to pose the folds of her kimono in the precious depictions of traditional dances and who knows turn on the eyes of the spectators with morbid attention in the studied movements of a strip-tease: of the woman who burns all her perceptive powers in the factories of the microscopic transistors in two years, of the "loves" who, with a centuries-old technique, dive for fishing corals and pearls; of the Japanese woman, essential actress of a drama of transformation taking place in a country of very ancient civilization that only for a century has opened the doors of her fantastic world in the eyes of the foreigner.

Aido: Slave of Love

After wandering into a cemetery, a young man named Shusei is led by the mysterious Madame Enjoji to a secluded mansion. There, he is introduced to Aido, an ethereal woman who seems to be the living embodiment of his most surreal erotic fantasies. Caught between the real world and a haunting dreamscape, Shusei becomes obsessed with Aido.

The Morning Schedule

Two college buddies try to understand a young woman's suicide through her Super-8 films and clips from their summer trips together.

Bride of the Andes

A young Japanese woman comes to Peru to marry a man she has never seen in this somber drama highlighted by cultural differences. Her husband is a first-generation Japanese and both are bound to the time-honored tradition of arranged marriages. Bringing her child from a previous marriage, she finds her new husband living with Andes Mountain Indians and working for an archaeological expedition. The man and her boy take to each other, and the woman begins to study and understand the lives of the Indians. When her husband is killed mining for Incan treasure, she uses the money sent by the state to stay and help the villagers whom she has come to love.

The Song of the Bwana Toshi

Traveling to Africa in a cultural exchange program, a young Japanese engineer discovers a world completely unlike the one he knows. His interaction with the Africans he meets reveals to him that he has been living a lie, and that he is not the man he thought he was.

Nanami: The Inferno of First Love

A teenage goldsmith with a dark past tragically falls in love with a young nude model.

She and He

As her husband Eiichi becomes more entangled in his life as businessman, Naoko looks for ways to expand her own life even as her husband's life shrinks in scope and intimacy. She finds new interests, new love, and a greater sense of her place in the world.

Bad Boys

A young delinquent takes part in a robbery and is sentenced to a juvenile detention center, where he clashes with other youths and reflects on his life experiences.

Children Who Draw

Children Who Draw explores the delicate chemistry of school children interacting in an art class through a constant juxtaposition of observational black-and-white portraits of the young children with lyrical passages shot in vivid color exploring their imaginative and expressive paintings. Experimenting with color as an intimate expression of the children’s inner worlds, a tool for deeper psychological investigation, Hani allows his camera to roam freely across the drawings, “de-framing’” and enagaging the artwork in a manner reminiscent of Alain Resnais.

A Tale of Africa

A pilot crash-lands in the African wilds, and loses his memory. He finds an old man living in the jungle with his grand-daughter. He falls in love with the young girl and settles down happily with them; their idyllic life broken only by a visit from his long forgotten fiancee.

Tokyo 1958

A collaborative, newsreel-style portrait of Tokyo in 1957–58, blending photography, animation, and historical imagery to capture the city’s labor, rituals, and nightlife at the moment it became the world’s largest metropolis.

Children in the Classroom

A short documentary about the behaviour of Japanese primary school students.

Hōryū-ji

This celebrated documentary, filmed in colour, depicts one of the most famous of all Japanese temples. Horyu-ji, in the small town of Ikaruga outside Japan’s ancient capital of Nara, was one of the first Buddhist places of worship established in Japan, and contains the oldest surviving wooden buildings in the world, dating from the seventh century.

A Town Without Flies

A teaching film for social studies, which was developed as a new educational subject in 1947. At an elementary school in Hokkaido, children have started a fly extermination campaign to improve school hygiene. In order to eliminate the causes of flies, the entire town is working to improve the sanitary environment. The short was filmed with the cooperation of Mizukaido Elementary School in Joso City and is the first film in the "Social Studies Teaching Film System" by Iwanami Film Productions.