Movies: Takaharu Yasuoka

Sho is a loner who works at a small factory. He has no friends, hardly associates with his work-mates and is regarded as a weirdo because of his love for gun models. One day he buys a real gun from a local yakuza. This boosts his self-confidence and ...

Kenzo Okuzaki, a 62-year-old veteran of the New Guinea campaign in World War II, sets out to conduct interviews with survivors and relatives to find the truth behind atrocities committed while the Japanese garrison was surrounded, in particular the u...

In the slums of Osaka, various marginalized misfits have their own interpretations of love. Completely alienated from the outside world, they commit sexual perversions, violence and cannibalism....

A quiet killer is looking for a room. The real state agent, shy and expressionless, guides him through Tokyo, towards the ruins the decadent economy has left behind, in hopes of finding The Room....

Roughly chronological, from 3/96 to 11/96, with a coda in spring of 1997: inside compounds of Aum Shinrikyo, a Buddhist sect led by Shoko Asahara. (Members confessed to a murderous sarin attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995.) We see what they eat, wher...

Before World War II, Ikego village was an idyllic agriculture community. The Imperial Navy took over the village and the hills to build the largest ammunition preserve in Asia. When Japan lost, these facilities were taken over by the US Navy, and are...

A documentary series of interviews with elderly Japanese men, former soldiers in Thailand or Burma, who hid from the departing Japanese troops at the end of WWII and made their lives with native families....

December 1989, director Katsuyuki Hirano took on the journey of biking across Hokkaido under extreme weather. This is the documentary about that journey....

Bae Ponggi, a Korean woman who became a comfort woman for the former Japanese military in 1944, testifies for the first time in Okinawa in 1975, after Okinawa was returned to the mainland. In the "red-tiled house" on Tokashiki Island, Okinawa, which ...

Ten years after the introduction of the long-term care insurance system, some people question the uniformity of long-term care services and set up new long-term care facilities on their own. The film covers three welfare facilities and documents the ...

A2 is a continuation of director Tatsuya Mori's film A (1998), an incredible view inside the compound of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult after its leaders carried out the deadly sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995. Most followers had no idea tha...

In July 1988, Mizue Furui was in the Gaza Strip and West Bank with her camera as a rookie freelance journalist. Covering the Palestinian condition, she became acquainted with Ghada Ageel, a 23-year-old teacher at an elementary school, in November ...

A 25-year-old film student with a socially withdrawn brother films his family....

The year 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the foundation of Israel. It marks also the beginning of 60 years of the suffering for the Palestinian people. This tragedy is referred to as the “Nakba,” meaning catastrophe in Arabic. Since 1948 at least...