Movies: Ryota Bando

It’s 1940, and the population of Japan is divided over its entry into World War II. Satoko, the wife of a fabric merchant, is devoted to her husband but is beginning to suspect he’s up to something. Soon she allows herself to be drawn into a game in ...

After her brother goes missing, a young psychologist visits an infamous haunted and cursed location known as ‘Howling Village’ to investigate his disappearance and uncover her family’s dark history....

Lord Oda Nobunaga plans to control Japan where rival warlords battle by waging war against several clans. His vassal Araki Murashige stages a rebellion and promptly disappears....

A history drama portraying the confrontation between the indigenous Ainu people living on Japan’s northernmost main island—then called “Ezo” and now known as “Hokkaido”—and the “sisam”, the Ainu word for ethnic Japanese....

Childhood friends find a creature with mysterious powers that pushes them to discover the bonds that tie the three students together....

Twelve boys and girls gather at an abandoned hospital to die for various different reasons. There, they find the body of a dead boy. The twelve boys and girl attempt to find the person who killed the boy. During their search, the reasons why they wan...

Three patients of different backgrounds, illnesses and stages are being treated at a psychiatric clinic in Nagano Prefecture. Their cases range from the criminal to merely asocial. That should be that, but soon matters take a darker turn when a corps...

Forty years after leaving Japan for a boxing career in the U.S. that never panned out, Jin returns to restart his life with his old boxing buddies. When hotheaded young boxer Shogo asks for Jin’s help to get him back into the ring after an unfair los...

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The school’s handball club is about to close down. Can social media bring it back to life? Masao Kiyota is a high school student living in Japan’s southern Kumamoto Prefecture. Lacking passion for anything in life, he spends his days like so many yo...

Sakamichi Onoda is a high school student. He is an otaku, who loves animation and he is also a loner. Although he isn't good in sports, he decides to enroll in the bicycle racing club. Unexpectedly, he finds that he has a talent for bicycle racing. F...

Three young men live and work in a nearly-deserted Japanese city. The three wander the streets, ruminating on the pointlessness of life in the modern age, never quite living up to the deeds of a fallen friend, until one of them goes too far and perm...

Hanai Sota is 22-years-old and a university student in the veterinary department. Since he was little, he has always loved animals. His apartment is full of animals that needed help. One day, Hanai Sota saves a dog that was being used in experiments....

Keiko Tsuruoka’s film is at once traditional and contemporary: it gently mixes present-day gender and sexuality politics with the old-fashioned Japanese domestic drama. Traditional lacquerwork kitchenware is the Aoki family’s legacy, handed down to p...

Ishimori Uka is very shy and has a hard time making friends. When she was a middle school student, students made fun of her by calling her "stone". Around that time, she met Miura Kai with lemon color hair. Because of him, she entered the same high s...

Hokkaido, Japan: An old woman -- formerly a man -- lives by a lake in the northern reaches of Japan, gazing at Nakajima Island in its center where her daughter's body was found long ago. She hasn't been able to visit for almost 50 years. Tokyo: A mi...

A young bioarchaeologist Yukisuke is attracted to a girl Koyomi, who runs a small stand of taiyaki pastry that he often buys. Koyomi is hospitalized, however, by a car accident on a rainy day after they go out together, and wakes up with short term m...

Rin is a popular singer. He is about to propose to his girlfriend Mami, but they get into an argument. Rin runs out of the home and, while walking around, he suddenly goes down in the middle of a crosswalk. Takehito is the vocalist of unpopular indie...

Jun Wataguchi lives a lazy, half-hearted life, not going to school, hanging out with half-witted delinquents, and begging money from his friends. His parents, who run a shipping business transporting earth and sand for reclamation by boat, manage to ...

In the early days of the Showa era in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture a newborn baby is abandoned with a doll under the eaves of a merchant house along the pilgrimage route in Shikoku. It seems to be a pilgrim struggling to make a living. This baby girl ...