Using film footage and composition notes left by the late Ogawa Shinsuke, Chinese director Peng Xiaolian shot additional film and completed the work, which colorfully yet elegantly depicts the manufacturing process of the Kaminoyama red persimmon. The inhabitants of the tiny Japanese village of Kaminoyama explain that it is the perfect combination of earth, wind and rain that makes their village's persimmons superior to those grown anywhere else,...

An impoverished mother and her daughter-in-law eke out a lonely, desperate existence. In order to survive in feudal Japan, they are forced to murder lost samurai and sell their belongings for grain, then dump their corpses down a deep, dark hole. A woman and her daughter-in-law impersonate demons to lure and kill soldiers in samurai-era medieval Japan.

As the Empire of the Sun crumbles upon itself and a rain of firebombs falls upon Japan, the final death march of a nation is echoed in millions of smaller tragedies. Seita and his younger sister Setsuko are two children born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and now cast adrift in a world that lacks not the care to shelter them, but simply the resources. They are forced to fend for themselves in the aftermath of fires that swept entire cities...

Daigo Kobayashi, a cellist, dreamt of going around the world with his wife Mika. Unfortunately, the orchestra folds, so he sells his instrument, retreats to the small town he came from, lives in his late mother's house, and tries to start a new life. He answers a classified ad entitled 'Departures' thinking it is for a travel agency. Daigo's actual responsibilities entail preparing the local decedents for their "casketing," a process with an elaborate...

Director Hirokazu Koreeda turns the popularly held conventions of the typical samurai revenge tale on their head with this story of a man whose quest to avenge the death of his father gradually takes a back seat to his emerging role as a key figure in the community. The year is 1702, and young samurai Sozaemon Aoki (Junichi Okada) has arrived in Edo to seek revenge against Jubei Kanazawa (Tadanobu Asano). Kanazawa is the man responsible for the death...

In 17th-century Japan, a samurai's daughter, Oharu, falls in love with a servant. Caught together, the man is beheaded and Oharu and her family are exiled. After enduring further misfortunes as a concubine, a courtesan, wife, and prostitute, Oharu becomes a mendicant nun in her old age. A peerless chronicler of the soul who specialized in supremely emotional, visually exquisite films about the circumstances of women in Japanese society throughout...

A middle-aged actor and the wife of a photographer meet while on business in Tokyo. They strike up an unusual friendship in the hotel bar that helps them both overcome boredom and loneliness.

Hirsohima No Pika is an animated film based on the award winning children's book by the Japanese artist Toshi Maruki. Through Maruki's hear-rending but beautiful water color illustrations, the film tells the story of a young girl and her family who live through the horrific bombing of Hirsohima. Nominated for an Academy Award, Hellfire: a journey from Hiroshima caputres the artists Iri and Toshi Maruki in their decades long collaboration to creat...

Set in the three weeks from the test explosion in New Mexico to the dropping of the bomb, the action takes viewers into the room where the crucial political decisions are made, on board the Enola Gay, inside the bomb as it explodes, and in Hiroshima.