Asian Cinema
Cinema has been a part of Asian cultures for more than a century. We offer a selection of films from older classic titles (King Hu's THE FATE OF LEE KHAN) to more recent family dramas by the Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda, along with films from Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam and Thailand.
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Antiporno
Kyoko, a young artist with a sadomasochistic streak, wreaks havoc on everyone that she encounters, but her absolute worst behavior is reserved for her simpering older assistant Noriko, whom she routinely humiliates in increasingly kinky ways. That is, until their sense of reality gets upended in ...
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Aroused by Gymnopedies
Shinji, a middle-aged film director, is trapped in a seemingly hopeless cycle of creative crisis and self-destruction. After his failure making art films, he now finds himself shooting low-budget pornography as a means to get by. Over the span of one week, he embarks on a series of sexual encount...
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Dawn of the Felines
Three sex workers navigate the neon-soaked street of Ikebukuro, Tokyo. Each night brings new encounters – eccentric clients, dangerous fetishes, and the looming threat of police crackdowns – while each dawn finds them wrestling with loneliness, survival and the search for meaning in a city that r...
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White Lily
Celebrated ceramic artist Tokiko (Kaori Yamaguchi) takes Haruka (Rin Asuka), a troubled teenage runaway, into her home where she becomes her apprentice. When Tokiko’s husband dies, Haruka promises to remain by her side, and the two begin a romantic, but volatile relationship. Overcome by sorrow a...
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Green Fish
Released from his mandatory military service, Makdong (Han Suk-gyu) returns to a hometown he no longer recognizes. After rescuing a beautiful young woman from harassment on a train, his life takes an unexpected turn when she unwittingly lures him into the criminal underworld. Finding himself in a...
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Peppermint Candy
Yongho (Sul Kyung-gu) stares down an oncoming train as twenty years of his life flash before his eyes. Proceeding to move backward in time, Lee Chang-dong's acclaimed second directorial feature rewinds the protagonist's loss of humanity – from his fraught, self-hating middle age through his callo...
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Oasis
Fresh out of prison, Hong Jong-du (Sul Kyung-gu) finds an unlikely soulmate in Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), the daughter of the victim of the hit-and-run accident for which he went to jail. Wheelchair-bound and suffering from severe cerebral palsy, Gong-ju is kept cloistered in a cheap apartment by her ...
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Love Nonetheless
Secondhand bookstore owner Tada (Seto Koji) can’t forget Ikka (Sato Honami), a former colleague at his old job, despite the fact that one of his regular customers, Misaki (Kawai Yumi), persistently asks him to marry her. Meanwhile, Ikka feels overwhelmed by preparations for her wedding to Ryosuke...
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Seventh Code
Akiko (Atsuko Maeda) travels to Vladivostok, Russia to reconnect with Matsunaga, a businessman she met in Tokyo and has been unable to forget ever since. When she finally meets Matsunaga, he tells her not to trust anyone in a foreign country and abruptly leaves. When Akiko attempts to follow him,...
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Rude to Love
Momoko (Noriko Eguchi) is a 41-year-old housewife who has been married to her husband, Mamoru, for eight years. She meticulously maintains their home and devotedly attends to his every needs, but all her care and attention masks the emotional rift that has developed between them. Mamoru has grown...
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Agent of Happiness
How is happiness measured? Can satisfaction with one’s life be rated on a scale from one to ten? The Kingdom of Bhutan’s famous – and highly exoticized – government policy measuring its nation’s Gross National Happiness operates on the idea that the basic tenets of fulfillment can and should be q...
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Picture of Spring
Yumiko Haruno works as a waitress at a cafe that has been around for a long time. She spends her days aimlessly and without a dream for her future. On an ordinary day at her job, Yumiko notices middle aged man Ichirou Haga looking intently at shunga (Japanese erotic paintings that were popular du...
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Wet Woman in the Wind
A tornado of unbridled sexual desire is unleashed when a free spirited seductress sets her sights on a reclusive playwright. Wet Woman in the Wind highlights the id in its stream of consciousness tale. Having a character who overturns the inhibitions of all that cross her path with wild abandon a...
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The Nude Woman
Saeko, a 27-year-old housewife without children, loves reading books and often goes to an nearby library. She accidentally comes across a dirty magazine filled with pictures of naked women. Among the photos, she finds one of a young woman who seems different than all the others and, out of curios...
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Shunga: The Lost Japanese Erotica
Discover shunga, the explicit and exquisite form of Japanese erotic art which reached its height between 1600 and 1900, in this immersive documentary that reveals the beauty, detailed craft, and extraordinary imagination behind these powerful scrolls and prints in addition to their important hist...
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The Extremists' Opera
When theater director Naoko (Saori) holds auditions for the first production of her newly established all-female theater troupe, she is mesmerized by Haru (Arisa Nakamura), who barges into the old garage where they rehearse. Naoko chooses Haru to be the lead and leverages her power as director to...
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A Far Shore
Aoi is a seventeen-year-old mother living in Okinawa who drops out of school so she can work an illegal job as a nightclub hostess for rent money. Struggling to protect her child while trapped in a seemingly never-ending cycle of poverty and violence with her deadbeat husband, she turns to ever m...
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The Gospel of the Beast
After his father goes missing, fifteen-year-old Mateo takes responsibility for his two younger siblings. But when a confrontation with a classmate escalates to violence and leads to the boy's accidental death, Mateo seeks help from Berto, a local gang leader whom he barely knows. Berto introduces...
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Autobiography
In a rural Indonesian town, young Rakib works as the lone housekeeper of an empty mansion belonging to Purna, a retired general whose family his ancestors have served for centuries. When Purna returns home to run for mayor, Rakib bonds with the older gentleman, who becomes his mentor. But after a...
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Tomorrow Is a Long Time
Seventeen-year-old Meng leads an unfulfilling existence in Singapore, living at home with his austere, hard-working exterminator father, while being coerced and bullied by his peers at school. Everything changes when he is forced into compulsory military service early and embarks on a life-alteri...
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Winner Takes All
A series of robberies committed by Japanese ninjas and bearing the stamp of the Shihs, a once-notorious family of burglars, attracts the interest of Kuan Te-hsing (Wang Yu) and Richard Burt (Mai Te-lo), two lowly assistants in the Yang Detective Agency. Meanwhile, a Japanese girl hires them to un...
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Hero
Like many impoverished villagers at the end of the Qin Dynasty, Ma Yong Zhen (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a pugilist from Shantung, moves to big city with his brother to seek his fortune. Initially finding work as a manual laborer, Ma becomes enamored by the lifestyle of local gang boss Tam See (Yuen Bia...
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The Illegal Immigrant
With the help of a crime syndicate, Chang Chun-chiu travels from Canton to New York’s Chinatown by way of Hong Kong. There, he enters into a sham marriage with the sister of a friend in order to obtain a green card and works at a Canal Street sweatshop to pay off his debts. Immigration authoritie...
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The Puppet
Ji-hoon, a jaded psychiatrist is visited by Hyun-jin, the beautiful fiancée of his colleague, who is suffering from disturbing hallucinations. He uses hypnotism to seek answers into her dark past, only to find himself wrapped up in her delusions and falling for her charms. Soon, Ji-hoo crosses th...