Country:Japan

Director:Takashi Shimizu

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Shimizu casts cult director Shinya Tsukamoto as a cameraman possessed by a craving to understand fear—what it is and where it ultimately leads. He wanders the Tokyo streets as a voyeur, hungrily looking for clues. The title refers to a person who is not forthcoming but it also means, oddly enough, the dieties the one visits in a foreign country. Shimizu creates a new mythology based on old historical occult practice and theory, a collage of various authors’ fiction, and urban legends.

Country:Japan, Poland

Director:Mamorou Oshi

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

Mamorou Oshi made a name for himself as the creator of the groundbreaking anime Ghost in the Shell where his interest in reflexive narrative and parallel reality was pronounced. In this experiment with live action he takes his concerns a step futher with a nod to the work of Tarkovsky. The result takes cinema to its next open ended life: In a gloomy future world, young people are addicted to an illegal and deadly battle simulation game called Avalon.

Country:Japan

Director:Yoshishige Yoshida

Summary:

This stunning film tells two interconnected stories, one of fictional characters in the present day and the other based on actual characters in the past. In the past there is the anarchist Sakae Osugi who was assassinated by the Japanese military in 1923. The story tells of his relationship with three women: Hori Yasuko, his wife; Noe Ito, his third lover, who was to die with him; and his jealous, second lover, Masaoka Itsuko, a militant feminist who attempts to kill him in a tea house in 1916.

Country:Japan

Director:Hiroshi Teshigahara

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

This was Teshigahara’s first collaboration with metaphysical writer Kobo Abe who invented a documentary/fantasy double world with as many ghosts as people. Penniless miners talk in passing about labor unions. A miner and his young son go to a village in Kyushu where the miner has been told he'll find work, but it's a ghost town, save for one woman. The miner leaves and is followed by a man in a white suit and white gloves. A murder takes place: faked footprints, bribery and intrigue, investigations, a frame-up, and a ghost who wants to know why meet in a story of realism and the surreal.

Country:Japan

Director:Takashi Okazaki

Program:Contemporary World Cinema

Summary:

In a strange world of swords, guns and kimonos, cell phones and cybernetic body parts - a black samurai, Afro Samurai (sounding a lot like Samuel L. Jackson), seeks revenge from a man named Justice who killed his father and also happens to be the #1 fighter in the world. After Afro earns the rank of #2 fighter, he starts his lonely walk to revenge. He faces bounty hunters, bar thugs and fanatical monks - all of whom seem to have clues to the whereabouts of Justice and all of whom covet the position of #2 for themselves.

Link to IMDB.com

Country:Japan

Director:Satoshi Kon

Program:Contemporary World Cinema

Summary:

Satoshi Kon’s groundbreaking and gleefully colourful anime pushes at the border line of our personal reality sensors. Three scientists at a foundation for Psychiatric Research fail to secure a device they have invented, the D.C. Mini, which allows people to record and watch their dreams. A thief uses the device to enter people's minds, when awake, and distract them with their own dreams and those of others. Chaos ensues.

Link to IMDB.com