Movies: Shogen

A nameless gunfighter arrives in a town ripped apart by rival gangs and, though courted by both to join, chooses his own path....

Kaiji Ito moves to Japan after graduating from high school. Unable to find a job and frustrated with society at large, Kaiji spends his days gambling, vandalizing cars, and drinking booze. Two years later and his life is no better. A debt collector n...

Following the excitement of first Bangkok and then New York, a big murder case takes place in Tokyo. Chinatown master detectives Tangren and Qinfeng are invited to take up the mystery. Adding to the excitement are the other detectives on the CRIMASTE...

Designer Enatsu worries about his sexless life. Office worker Akane is getting ready to return to work while undergoing rehab at home for panic attacks. Elite advertising agent Ikeyama wants to end his relationship with his lover. A shabby man named ...

After a tragic accident that killed her mother and left her daughter Nirmala missing, Wening embarks on a desperate search for Nirmala, enlisting the help of a podcaster, a Japanese researcher, and a shaman, all while haunted by her mother’s ghost an...

The story of the relationship between a college student whose relationship with her boyfriend is going nowhere and a bisexual medical artist who makes prosthetic body parts. Haru is a college student ignored by her boyfriend yet believes she is still...

One day an idol is bitten by a zombie and before she is taken into custody, she runs away. She only has 72 hours left until she becomes one, so she tries to find the zombie serum, but high school girl zombie hunter and zombies attack her. Will she ma...

When a Japanese pilot crash-lands on the tiny remote Hawaiian island of Ni'ihau, he is met with courtesy and traditional Hawaiian hospitality from the locals - until they discover he was part of the recent attack on Pearl Harbor. Soon the community ...

In Okinawa, a down-and-out middle-aged yakuza underling named Shidara kidnaps and confines a high school girl named Yui, the daughter of a fellow yakuza’s mistress....

Tourists, foreigners and outcasts converge on the streets of Osaka in this sprawling ensemble drama by Japan-based, Malaysia-born filmmaker Lim Kah Wai. His eighth feature explores the lesser-known aspects of the Asian melting pot city through the ey...

Nao Tsuyama, a disabled athlete, refuses to let his articifical leg hinder his dream to become a professional boxer. His remarkable journey takes him from Japan to the Philippines, and specifically the celebrated ‘Gensan’ quarter which has spawned wo...

Aoi has dropped out of high school and gives birth to a baby son with her husband Masaya. They live in Okinawa, the Southern island of Japan where they were both born. To make ends meet, she starts working as a night-club hostess. Masaya loses his jo...

Progressing from sound to color, Lighting Over the Beyond is a road movie that traces the roots of cinema and the history of war while asking "What is war?" and "What is an enemy?"....

Set in a spa town, Akira Takasu (Masatoshi Nagase) is a carver and a mailman. He keeps in touch with poet Penguin (Masataka Kubota). Penguin has a female fan with the name of Moonlit Night's Star (Sakurako Konishi). She sends letters to Penguin. One ...

A Filipino transgender woman, Marie, who is drawn into the Yakuza gangster life after befriending Ai, the rebellious daughter of a powerful Yakuza boss. Set against the pulsating background of the 1990s nightlife in Sapporo, Hokkaido, the film charts...

The film is based on a true story about an Okinawan sansen (3 stringed guitar) player named Ryo and his experiences growing up in Okinawa in 1968. Ryo meets an American military solider named George, and they discover that they have more similarities...

Fewer samurai films are being made, and the Uzumasa studio has fallen on hard times. One day, veteran "kirareyaku" (whose job it is to be felled with a sword by a film's star) actor Kamiyama is tasked with teaching sword action techniques to fledglin...

Yumi moves into her boyfriend's Tokyo apartment but on the night of the move, he is called away for business in New York. The couple communicates over Skype and over the course of four nights, their relationship descends into an abyss of mistrust and...

As the end approaches for Japan’s age of military rule, the Tokugawa shogunate brings together a squad of ruthless assassins to defend its representatives in Kyoto. These men were known as the Shinsengumi. Formidable swordsmen with unswerving dedicat...

A bittersweet, hilarious, enlightening and inspirational road trip through Japanese arthouse cinemas with a heartily independent filmmaker, who also struggles to release his own movies in real life....