With his latest drama film, Funahashi’s delivers a contender for this year’s best Japanese film.
Category: Socially engaged narrative
Pulse (2001) review
“An extra-ordinary apocalyptic horror narrative that explores, in a refined way, the destructive impact of consumption – the pulsating attraction of injecting solitary enjoyment by engaging with gadgets and screens – on our subjective position and the fabric of bonds that surrounds us.”
Pale Flower (1964) review
“A ‘seductive’ nihilistic masterpiece that explores the unescapable subjective problems created by the rhythmic capitalistic machinery.”
Stone Steps (2022) review [JFFH 2022]
A great indie narrative that highlights the need for the parental and the traditional Other to aid the subject to embark on the path of his own desire.
Intolerance (2021) [22nd Nippon Connection]
Yoshida’s narrative hits all the right emotional notes for the audience and that its message will long linger in the spectator’s mind.
A Madder Red (2021) review [Nippon Connection 2022]
Machiko Ono and Yuki Katayama breathe extra-ordinary life and realism into the pain, the hopes, the white lies, the tears, the smiles, and the anger of contemporary female subjects subjected to a phallically-structured societal system. Highly recommended.
Random Call (2022) review [OAFF 2022]
Ohkanda’s narrative proves that one does not need a big budget to deliver a narrative that touches the spectator.
Angry Son (2022) review [OAFF 2022]
“An incredibly rich and deep narrative that not only delivers a satisfying coming-of-age story but also an elegantly delivered social commentary on some of the frictions marking Japanese society.”
Short Movie Time: The Fish With One Sleeve (2021) review
“Tokaibayashi Tsuyoshi delivers an important narrative that reveals how a societal system, which struggles with the newly-posed riddle of gender, problematizes the integration of the transgender subject in its fabric.”
An inn at Osaka (1954) review
“An important document that traces how the post-war capitalistic machine of modernity poisons subjectivity by ‘promoting’ a selfish monetary desire, slowly empties social relations, and causes a blossoming of a wide range of subjective conflicts and societal problems.”
Make The Devil Laugh (2021) review [Skip City International D-Festival 2021]
An amazing socially-engaged piece of cinema that beautifully sketches out how problematic the enjoyment of the societal Other can be.
Yamabuki (2022) review [IFFR 2022]
“A beautiful socially-engaged narrative that explores the very fact that, by being grasped within the societal network of relations, one cannot but influence the other and become influenced by the other’s speech and acts.”
Onibaba (1964) review
A veritable horror classic.
The Town of Headcounts (2020) review [Nippon Connection 2021]
“His dystopian ‘thriller’ does not only masterly highlight, in a chilling way, the various ills that marks contemporary society, but also shows, that within such dystopian world, a subject can always rediscover something to life and fight for.”
Goto-san (2021) review [OAFF 2021]
“Gokan expertly reveals the position of the freeter as an attempt to escape the capitalistic machinery but also as a position that most easily falls prey to the ugliest structures of exploitation to keep the profit-focused system going.”
psycho-cinematography 