In the slums of postwar Osaka, the prospects for economic revitalization prove bleak, and the disenfranchised find themselves eking out an existence through any available means. A band of delinquents led by a resourceful prostitute named Hanako (Kayoko Honoo) approaches desperate shipyard workers eager to earn extra income by selling blood once a week to […]
In the film’s chaotically fragmented and disorienting opening sequence, an over-animated, carefree adolescent student named Makoto (Kuwano Miyuki) recklessly runs up alongside a series of randomly selected vehicles caught in traffic and uses her disarming joviality to engage the unsuspecting driver into a polite, subtly flirtatious conversation before to attempting to ingratiate herself into obtaining […]
A somber and unassuming adolescent named Masao (Hiroshi Fujikawa), still dressed in his school uniform, pensively sits on the sidewalk of a high-traffic metropolitan park watching over a ventilated wooden crate. An affable, wealthy young woman named Yoko Kuhara (Yuki Tominaga), the daughter of a company director at Koyo Electric, curiously peeks inside to discover […]
On an uneventful evening at a gas station in Burkina Faso, a service attendant completes a transaction with a passing motorist and begins to enter the office when he is ambushed by two armed men who, after a brief struggle, manage to break free from him and wrest control of the cash box. But before […]
Tilaï opens to a long sequence, off-axis shot of a lone traveler moving away from view as he slowly traverses the arid, featureless plain on a lumbering, overburdened mule and disappears into the desolate horizon. It is an appropriately distanced and alienated introduction for the weary, but sanguine Saga (Rasmane Ouedraogo) who, after an extended […]
Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu) has settled into a complacent, domestic life of a widower with his adult children – his son Kazuo (Shinichiro Mikami) and daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita) – in postwar Tokyo. Michiko is his only daughter, and has naturally assumed the role of lady of the house after her mother’s death. Upon hearing […]