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Asian Cinema

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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Asian Cinema
  • 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...

  • 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,...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Okiku and the World

    In the mid-19th century, Okiku lives in a tenement row house in the sprawling city of Edo. There, she cares for her father, Genbei, a former samurai, whom she supports by teaching children in a temple school. Yasuke and his newly recruited partner, Chuji, regularly visit the tenement to collect t...

  • Human Lanterns

    In this maniacal mashup of martial arts and the macabre, a psychotic retired swordsman (Lo Lieh) finds a unique way to get retribution for his past humiliations while seeking vengeance on his enemies. Inside his secret workshop, he creates lanterns made from the human skin of his rivals’ sisters,...

  • The Golden Lotus

    In this Shaw Brothers adaptation of the most erotic novel in Chinese history, director Han Hsiang Li recounts the depraved exploits of a Sung Dynasty lothario. Hsi Men-ching (Yeung Kwan) already has one wife and three concubines, but that does not stop him from coveting for more. He eventually re...

  • Farewell My Concubine

    Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) and Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) grow up enduring the harsh training of the Peking Opera Academy, where instructors regularly beat the students to instill in them the discipline needed to master the complex physical and vocal techniques of this ancient art. As the two b...

  • Girl's Blood

    Satsuki is a karate expert with a gender identity disorder. Chinatsu is on the run from her abusive husband. Miko works part-time as an S&M queen, and Mayu is a baby face Lolita. Four women with very different life stories come together at Girl's Blood, a members-only, illegal mixed martial arts...

  • Asia-pol

    It’s not Interpol, it's Asia-pol, a law enforcement agency somewhere between the police and Her Majesty's Secret Service. Jimmy Wang Yu (One-Armed Swordsman) stars in his first major modern day role as a down and dirty secret agent battling against homicidal Japanese gold smugglers amidst femme f...

  • By a Man's Face Shall You Know Him

    In postwar Japan a downtrodden neighborhood is nearly torn apart when a Korean gang tries to take over the local market. As anger escalates to the brink, tough as nails WWII veteran Dr. Amamiya (played by real life former yakuza Noboru Ando) steps in to stop the conflict.

    Director Tai Kato’s gr...