Hotel New Moon

The joys and sorrows of the little schoolboy, Akira, in a modern Japan. A story about friendship and loyalty.

Yuriko, once a concert pianist, now practices home-making while husband Takashi stays out late with co-workers, leaving her to decay into severe mental illness.

Mari lives a comfortable life as a single woman. She has a nice job at a company and resides in an apartment in the suburbs of Tokyo. A couple lives next to door to her. Mari can hear them argue or making happy conversations everyday. One night, when Mari comes back home, she sees her next door neighbor sitting in front of his door and shivering from the cold. He locked himself out.

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.