Visiting a film festival is much like going to a restaurant that only serves your favourite food. While you want to eat everything, you can’t – you have but one stomach, you must make difficult choices. Luckily, at psychocinema, we have had a sample of what is on offer at the Nippon Connection and are able to guide those who seek some guidance.

While our recommendations can help visitors of the film festival choice, we would also encourage them to take a chance on a movie merely because of the title’s appeal. Maybe the film of your choosing will be part of our coverage in the following month.

[Click the banner to learn more about the program of this year’s Nippon Connection]

Our recommendations

5 Centimeters Per Second (2025) by Yoshiyuki Okuyama

5 Centimeters Per Second should be considered the fully blossomed fruit of Makoto Shinkai’s influential animated film. Okuyama does not only succeed in translating Shinkai’s visual language into a visual arresting journey that evocatively traces out the aftermath of the encounter, but utilizes the increased running time to thoughtfully elaborate on the effects the encounter sorts on the subject. Okuyama’s film, just like Shinkai’s anti-romance, ultimately asks the spectator to let go of the fantasy of The Sexual Relationship, to let go of the unobtainable fantasy that inhibits and, by emphasizing absence, imprisons him.

Dawn Chorus (2025) by Yoshinori Sato

Dawn Chorus is a beautiful meditative narrative about the struggles of becoming subject. However, Sato’s film should not be mistaken for a narrative that celebrates motherly love. On the contrary, Sato shows, by evoking the destabilizing effect of familial fracture, the need for the subject to have an Other subject to address his signifiers of suffering to and who grants him the space to construct an ego out of the shards he is given by his past

Kokuho (2025) by Sang-Il Lee

Kokuho is a deeply moving experience – a highly affective drama of the stage-name – that does not only offer the spectator a mesmerizing and deeply intimate celebration of the performative art of kabuki – the stylized dances, movements, and highly dramatic way of delivering speech, but also unearths the radical subjective dimension of embodying and performing a role. Sang-Il Lee brings the poetic and dramatic truth of Kabuki to life with his deeply respectful framing and Ryusei Yokohama and Ryo Yoshizawa, both delivering career-defining performances, corroborate that the stylized performance of kabuki can create a space for transformative experiences for the performer as well as for the spectator – the art of Kabuki can hit the unconscious. Let us hope that Sang-Il Lee is given the chance to release his original four and a half hours cut in the future – We are ready.

I Fell In Love With a Z-grade Director in Brooklyn (2025) by Kenichi Ugana

I Fell in Love With a Z-Grade Director In Brooklyn might be one of the most pleasant surprises of this year. Ugana’s film does not only have a lot of heart, but also offers a touching celebration of desire and the joys of Z-grade filmmaking. I Fell in Love With a Z-Grade Director In Brooklyn might even convince some people to finally pursue their love for film.

New Group (2025) by Yuta Shimotsu

With New Group, Yuta Shimotsu delivers a narrative that, in all probability, will be called the first true J-horror classic of the current decade. By crafting an exciting, yet unheimlich narrative puzzle and attacking the spectator with a variety of unsettling images, Shimotsu invites does not only frame the terror of conformity in an unforgettable way but demands that the spectator, whether he likes it or not, puts the way he relates to Otherness into question.

A Samurai In Time (2024) by Jun’ichi Yasuda

A Samurai In Time is a beautiful and genuinely endearing love-letter to the chanbara genre. While Yasuda’s reliance on the static shot might feel too straightforward at first glance, he utilizes its full potential to create many effective light-hearted moments and allow the sword-fighting to come to full its right. Recommended viewing.

Suzuki: Bakudan (2025) by Akira Nagai

Suzuki=Bakudan does not only take the spectator on a thrilling ride, a high-stakes chess game with signifiers as rooks, but also brutally confronts him with the effects of the over-emphasis of pleasure and consumption within social interactions on the subject, a driven by his demand for symbolic recognition. Thanks to Jiro Sato’s pitch-perfect performance, Akira Nagai succeeds in delivering one of the most thrilling societal critiques in recent memory. 

2 Seasons, 2 Strangers (2025) by Sho Miyake

Two Seasons, Two Strangers offers a moody experience that explores the tension between one’s conscious discourse and one’s unconscious discourse with elegance and arresting beauty. However, as Miyake’s film centres on conversational subtleties and silent observation, some spectators might struggle, especially in the second half, to make sense of what, due to exchange of signifiers, happens to the main character.