Charts the troubled teenage years of students Yūichi Hasumi and Shūsuke Hoshino, exploring the shifting and complex power dynamics of their relationship against the backdrop of Yūichi's love for the dreamy and abstract music of pop star Lily Chou-Chou.
Sumika Kanzaki
High school students Miho and Shouta are preparing for college entrance examinations. Miho comes from an island without even one cram school, while Shouta lives in Tokyo and works a part-time job. Both are striving to pass exams so they can enter college. The pair enroll in Z-Kai's correspondence education courses, and their lives cross before they realize it.
Tokyo schoolgirl Hiromi and her friends engage in a practice known as enjo kosai, or "compensated dating", where older men pay young girls for dates. Hiromi plunges deeper into this world to raise money for an expensive ring.
Jam Films is a 2002 suite of 7 shorts produced by Sega/Amuse.
Martín's lucky hit when he wins the most lucrative prize in television history puts his life upside down.
In 1923, teenager Kim Shun-Pei moves from Cheju Island, in South Korea, to Osaka, in Japan. Along the years, he becomes a cruel, greedy and violent man and builds a factory of kamaboko, processed seafood products, in his poor Korean-Japanese community exploiting his employees.
Two friends take two prostitutes for a night of pleasure. But the night turns out to be frustrating for all involved, as much bitterness is revealed in their conversation and attitudes, uncovering their anguish and deeper feelings, and the emptiness of their lives.
When a crew of bank robbers believes that an alluring young woman has blown their cover, they kidnap the girl. Back at their hideout they develop sinister plans to rape and then kill her. When one of the crooks mysteriously turns up dead however, they begin to realize that their intended victim may be a powerful, vindictive, supernatural force.
The making of 'All About Lily Chou-Chou' starting from its conception as an interactive story that played out on a BBS
A disillusioned Natsume arrives at Coin de Rue, a popular Tokyo pastry shop, begging for work. Aiming to become a high-calibre pastry chef, she is determined to overcome both her past and the challenges ahead. Pastry critic Tomura is a frequent visitor to Coin de Rue. Moved by Natsume's persistence, he slowly begins to confront his own painful past aided, of course, by mouthfuls of tasty pastries.
Six friends are captured and tortured by a murderous family after giving a ride home to a desperate stranger.
In spring, a girl leaves the island of Hokkaido to attend university in Tokyo. Once there, she is asked to reveal why she wanted to go there in the first place.
A story about the disappearance of Kirishima, a star athlete of the volleyball club, and how his disappearance affects every person in school.
In a warehouse in the heart of Los Angeles, a dwindling handful of devoted craftspeople maintain more than 80,000 student musical instruments, the largest remaining workshop in America of its kind. Meet four unforgettable characters whose broken-and-repaired lives have been dedicated to bringing so much more than music to the schoolchildren of this city.
This simple, charming series follows a young woman as she job hunts and experiences various changes in her life, all while her cat Daru remains the supportive constant.
Yueh-chen has an obsession with her classmate Shihao, but is too shy to confess to him directly. She sends in her best friend, Kerou, to act as a go-between, and Shihao ends up falling for Kerou, who is not sure what to think of him.
To find Ilona and unlock the secrets of her disappearance, Karas must plunge deep into the parallel worlds of corporate espionage, organized crime and genetic research - where the truth imprisons whoever finds it first and miracles can be bought but at a great price.
Something is about to change drastically, and the only thing to do is to witness it.
Only three days before their high school festival, guitarist Kei, drummer Kyoko, and bassist Nozomi are forced to recruit a new lead vocalist for their band. They choose Korean exchange student Son, though her comprehension of Japanese is a bit rough! It's a race against time as the group struggles to learn three tunes for the festival's rock concert—including a classic '80s punk-pop song by the Japanese group The Blue Hearts called "Linda Linda".
Victor, a Lower East Side teenager, as he deals with his eccentric family, including his strict grandmother, his bratty sister, and a younger brother who completely idolizes him. Along the way he tries to win the affections of Judy, who is very careful and calculating when it comes to how she deals with men.
An unemployed Cowboy who can't find love vows to stay on a barstool for three months. Shortly thereafter, he meets a young female art student and quickly forgets his misery. The pair begin to transform each other's worlds while spending time drinking, dancing and examining the mysteries of life. Will the Cowboy finally find love or should he have just stayed on his barstool?
Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries. NJ is morose: his brother owes him money, his mother-in-law is in a coma, his wife suffers a spiritual crisis when she finds her life a blank and his business partners make bad decisions.
14-year old Erik gets sent to live with his older brother, Henry, during the summer as his mother is dying in cancer. Henry starts dating Ewa, who is married to Berra. A few days after Ewa shows up battered and bruised from an altercation with Berra, he is found dead on a nearby parking lot.
A wealthy out-of-towner hires an indigent man to abduct an estranged family member.
When George Tanner does business with high-ranking Yakuza Tono, Tono kidnaps his daughter, and George summons his old friend, private eye Harry Kilmer, to Japan to investigate.
The story of a teenage boy named Yu, who falls for Yoko, a girl he runs into while working as an "up-skirt" photographer in an offshoot of the porn industry. His attempts to woo her are complicated by a spot of cross-dressing – which convinces Yoko that she is lesbian – dalliances with kung-fu and crime, and a constant struggle with the guilt that's a legacy of his Catholic upbringing.
William Walker and his mercenary corps enter Nicaragua in the middle of the 19th century in order to install a new government by a coup d'etat.
Every choice has a consequence. But what if the flip of a coin could trigger two separate but parallel destinies? Bobby and Kate are a young New York couple at a crossroads whose lives are about to take very different directions. A seemingly ordinary July 4th is cleaved in two by the flip of a coin. One path leads them to gentle discoveries about family, loss and each other on a visit to Brooklyn, and the other plunges them into an urban nightmare of pursuit, suspense and murder in Manhattan.
The outskirts of Turin. Celeste, Giorgia and Letizia are three young women as different as they come, but all are linked by a common element: as cisgender women, they are guests in the ballroom scene. A subculture originally born within the African American and Latine LGBTQ community of New York, it is now quite present in Italy as well. It is precisely here that the three women have found a safe space where they can be masters of their own bodies without judgement, prejudices, or provocation. They are about to embark on a journey that will make them grow up and reflect on choices they must make for themselves: while Giorgia is increasingly rooted to her city, Celeste and Letizia are preparing to leave. A year-long coming-of-age story that uncovers dreams, desires, doubts, and the will to fight and to keep on living.
A young rock band, half from England and half from the US, drop out of college and move to the Sunset Strip to chase their dreams.
Desperate for a breakthrough as she nears the big 4-0, struggling New York City playwright Radha finds inspiration by reinventing herself as a rapper.
Two friends who work together at a Tokyo laundry are increasingly alienated from everyday life. They become fascinated with a deadly jellyfish.
Based on the true story of Valerie Solanas who was a 1960s radical preaching hatred toward men in her "Scum" manifesto. She wrote a screenplay for a film that she wanted Andy Warhol to produce, but he continued to ignore her. So she shot him. This is Valerie's story.
Residents of a rundown boardinghouse in 19th-century Japan, including a mysterious old man and an aging actor, get drawn into a love triangle that turns violent. When amoral thief Sutekichi breaks off his affair with landlady Osugi to romance her younger sister, Okayo, Osugi extracts her revenge by revealing her infidelity to her jealous husband.
Chronicling the troubled existence of Duncan Mudge, a 14-year-old misfit who—while vying for the attention of his vacant father—struggles to fill the void brought on by his mother's sudden death.
Gaby and Fred are preparing for the world swimming championships which will be held in Quebec City this year. Their love will be put to the test when a former love of Gaby's turns up at the championships. Gaby finds herself at a crucial point of her life where she has to choose whether to continue competing or follow another dream that she's cherished forever, but which seems impossible to everyone else—her dream to become an astronaut.
As the Algerian War draws to a close, a teenager with a girlfriend starts feeling homosexual urges for two of his classmates: a country boy, and a French-Algerian intellectual.
Masaki, a baseball player and gas-station attendant, gets into trouble with the local Yakuza and goes to Okinawa to get a gun to defend himself. There he meets Uehara, a tough gangster, who is in serious debt to the yakuza and planning revenge.
Office worker, Adam, quits work to return to his childhood home and settles into the comforts of his parent's backyard. A chance meeting with a friend from his past leads to them making a "Things to Do" list so they can fulfill some of their childhood dreams.