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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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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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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I, the Executioner
As the police investigate a sudden rash of brutal murders whose victims are all women the unscrupulous killer’s murky motivations remain hauntingly elusive. A labyrinthine character study slowly unfolds implying that the targets of these unspeakable acts may be culpable in their own shocking demi...
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Before, Now & Then
Nana (Happy Salma), the beautiful wife of a wealthy plantation owner, values her safety and material comforts but carries out a haunted existence, dreaming of her lost love who was murdered years ago during the Indonesian Revolution. Forced to confront her husband’s blatant infidelity, Nana makes...
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Facets of Love
Legends are born and dreams become reality in three tales centering around a Ming Dynasty brothel. Brought to life by visionary filmmaker Han Hsiang Li, Hong Kong's undisputed king of epic drama, this anthology of forbidden stories steams with erotic myths, secret trysts and romantic twists of fa...
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Illicit Desire
Tang Dynasty emperors and Ming Dynasty scholars along with assorted fortune tellers and Buddhist monks comprise the cast of characters in three mystical Chinese legends. Brought to life by director Han Hsiang Li, the undisputed master of the Hong Kong costume epic, this erotic anthology presents ...