Precocious tween Karin finds herself abandoned by her father in rural Japan. Living in a temple with her grandfather, she meets Anzu, a giant "ghost cat" and notorious layabout tasked with looking after her. Distrustful of her new guardian, Karin sabotages Anzu's odd jobs for the townsfolk and befriends the eccentric local forest spirits. In an effort to win Karin over, Anzu accidentally makes a deal with the devil, and all Hell breaks loose.
Single mother Paulette decides to make up for her mistake by cooking a chicken with peppers for her daughter — only she can't cook and shopkeepers are on strike.
Alice is 27 years old today. Even though she is suffocating a bit, she still lives with her parents and tends to live in her dreams to escape her dreary everyday life. After a psychedelic party on a factory roof, she has a serious drunken bike accident. Will this give her the courage to become an adult?
A lost cat, a giant talkative frog and a tsunami help a bank employee without ambition, his frustrated wife and a schizophrenic accountant to save Tokyo from an earthquake and find a meaning to their lives.
A Holocaust survivor reads a letter he wrote to the pig who saved his life. A young schoolgirl hears his testimony in class and sinks into a twisted dream where she confronts questions of identity, collective trauma, and the extremes of human nature.
Filmmaking can sometimes be a very chaotic process. Allie is about to learn it as the director just got one last crazy idea.
When living things, artificial things, geometry shapes, and lines encounter, a new direction is born.
Louise, ballerina at the Garnier Opera in 1895, rushes home after a show but is stopped by a friend asking for money. Louise knows what to do in order to repay her.
Living with OCD, Anna has an organized routine. This balance breaks when her sister forgets a piece of instrument. To bring it back, Anna has to face a world out of her control in which her fears materialize.
A traditional dance troupe prepares for the opening of the Summer Solstice Festival. The group is scheduled to take the stage in a few minutes, but one member is missing.
May 5, 1821. Napoleon Bonaparte, deposed emperor exiled on the island of St. Helena, is about to take his last breath. The son of a Corsican family, he has been close to death on many occasions since, as a young captain in the revolutionary army, he seized Toulon from the royalists in 1793.
Legendary anime director Rintaro’s (Metropolis, X/1999, Galaxy Express 999) first new work in over a decade depicts pioneering 1930s director Sadao Yamanaka and the production of his Nezumikozo Jirokichi. Despite dying before the age of 30, Yamanaka was a pivotal influence in Japanese cinema whose work would go on to inspire future generations. While most of his films have been lost to time, his scripts remain, and Nezumikozo Jirokichi recreates one of these lost films—a tale of a famous, virtuous bandit in old Edo—as imagined by Rintaro together with an all-star team including Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira, Memories), Taro Maki (Pluto, Millennium Actress) and Masao Maruyama (Ninja Scroll, Perfect Blue).
In this decidedly cheeky and deliriously fun animation, a decent, hard-working wolf must rely on his physical gifts in order to make ends meet for the sake of his family.
Directed by Japanese filmmaker Ryo Orikasa, this animated short was inspired by Henri Michaux’s book of poetry and drawings of the same name, about his experiences with mescaline. The film explores the limits of language and perception, creating connections between sound, meaning, shapes and movement.
A young mexican smuggler and a little girl travel illegally on top of a cargo train, called La Bestia, to get to the USA. An injury transforms his perception of the journey.
After her mother's death, Kim finds solace in wearing her mother's old sweater. However, the sweater begins to itch and even hurt her, but she still can't bring herself to take it off.
Two dandelion balls are the only survivors of a series of nuclear explosions that are destroying the Earth. At the end of their odyssey, they will find a new soil for the survival of their species.
A woman is locked in her home with an egg, which she is both attracted to and scared of. She eats the egg, she repents. She kills it. She lets the egg die of hunger. EGG is a poetic short film based on a small yet significant moment of the director’s own life. It portrays a moment of shame, defeat and yet of victory.
A hand-drawn ode to the multitudes contained by the La Défense district of Paris, where the future is encroaching from all sides in the form of skyscrapers made of steel and glass. The foot of a sculpture seems like an unlikely place to seek shelter, but where else can one find respite from it all?
Here, everything is The North. This is an account of the people I met in The North. However, my fragmented memory doesn't capture the essence at all.
