
Ivory consumption in Japan is a bit of a problem. It needs to be stamped out.
6.9In a once-scenic village now dominated by a vast trash disposal site, a young man yearns to break free from a cruel fate tying him to the very grounds.
7.1It was a pre-destined love and marriage for Sonoko and Tetsuo. They tied the knot and became husband and wife no questions asked. All is well then. Well, perhaps not. Each holds a secret that even the binds of matrimony cannot untie.
7.4Tokyo engineer Kariya arrives on a primitive tropical island, where he interacts with the Futori clan, to drill a well to power a sugar mill.
8.0A family of four are the sole inhabitants of a small island, where they struggle each day to irrigate their crops.
6.6In 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.
6.6Frustrated with her mundane life, a Tokyo office worker becomes obsessed with a fictional movie that she mistakes for a documentary. Fixating on a scene where stolen cash is buried in North Dakota, she travels to America to find it.
6.9A jazz musician seeks refuge from a lynch mob on a remote island, where he meets a hostile game warden and the young object of his attentions.
7.8In postwar Tokyo, Noriko lives with her extended family. Although she enjoys her career and her social life, her more traditional family worries about her single marital status at the advanced age of 28. 40-year-old business associate Takako proposes, Noriko's family press her into accepting, but when her widowed childhood friend Kenkichi returns to the neighborhood, she finds her heart leading in another direction.
7.3An elderly couple journey to Tokyo to visit their grown children, only to find them preoccupied and self-involved.
6.9War photographer W. Eugene Smith travels back to Japan where he documents the devastating effect of mercury poisoning in coastal communities.
6.9A story about the disappearance of Kirishima, a star athlete of the volleyball club, and how his disappearance affects every person in school.
7.4Charts 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.
8.1In 11th-century feudal Japan, following the exile of an idealistic governor, his wife and children are separated by slave traders; the children, Zushio and Anju, are sold into brutal servitude under the cruel bailiff Sansho.
7.3A group of travelers is stranded in a small country inn when the river floods during heavy rains. As the bad weather continues, tensions rise amongst the trapped travelers.
6.5A down-and-out businessman travels to a seaside town, where he meets a woman with unusual sexual powers.
7.4The winds of change blow as a family grapples with unemployment, alienation, mistrust and a lack of communication. When a Japanese salaryman loses his job to outsourcing to China, it's simply the beginning of a series of shattering incidents, leading to the implosion of the family unit.
7.3An aging foundry patriarch, gripped by terror of nuclear annihilation, tries to uproot his family to Brazil. When they petition to have him declared incompetent, a family-court counselor witnesses his obsession slide into ruin—and asks whether ignoring the atomic threat is any saner.
7.7While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins an affair with a neighbor who survived the war, Hachi. The mother disapproves and, when she can't steal Hachi for herself, tries to scare her daughter-in-law with a mysterious mask from a dead samurai.
6.4When Muraki, a porn magazine editor, watches a blue film depicting a gang rape in a school, he becomes obsessed with the lead actress. Quite by chance, whilst looking to reserve a location for a shoot, he happens to encounter her at a love hotel where she works as a receptionist. Her name is Nami and she reluctantly agrees to speak with him, and confesses that it was her in the film. Then, Muraki tells Nami that he wants her to model for him.
6.1In the 18th century, the pirates of Madagascar, lords of the Republic of Libertatia and masters of the Indian Ocean, live in an impregnable natural fortress, killing, robbing and plundering with impunity, so the British Navy hatches a daring plan to destroy them.