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| Image from Dreams for Sale, directed by Miwa Nishikawa |
"North America's premiere showcase for Japanese film"
- Firefox News
In its seventh season, with 10 days of screenings and over 20 titles, the 2013 iteration of JAPAN CUTS: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema will present the roughest, sharpest, and smoothest of today’s cutting-edge Japanese film scene, encompassing bigger-than-life blockbusters, high-concept art house titles, moving and provoking documentaries, delirious rom-coms, refined melodramas and a handful of UFOs—unidentified film objects. Taking place from July 11 to 21, JAPAN CUTS 2013 again dovetails with the New York Asian Film Festival (in its 12th edition, June 28-July 15), which co-presents 12 films from July 11-14.
From the deep to the deeply depraved, the fantastic to the fetishistic, the outstanding to the outrageous, JAPAN CUTS 2013 selections have the typical blend of unbending artistry and rebellious eccentricity, that has made the brand of the festival. Hard, rough, sharp, smooth and soft-edged: such is today's film scene from Japan.
Highlights include:
- the smash-hit samurai blockbuster Rurouni Kenshin
- Toshiaki Toyoda’s bloody, trippy, return-to-roots gangster thriller I’M FLASH!
- the star-studded road drama Dearest, a formidable shrine to film legend Ken Takakura
- Yuichi Fukuda’s off-the-wall pervy twist to the superhero genre, Hentai Kamen: The Forbidden Superhero
- the dark, controversial sex-thriller A Woman and War in the vein of the late Koji Wakamatsu’s best films
- Satoshi Miki’s mind-warping, bizarre, Spike Jonze-esque It’s Me It’s Me (featuring popstar Kazuya Kamenashi of KAT-TUN)
- Eiki Takahashi’s absorbing glimpse into the glitzy world of Japanese pop music, DOCUMENTARY OF AKB48 No flower without rain
- the North American premiere of Sion Sono’s 20-years-in-the-making underground science-fiction/gangster film Bad Film
- the winner of the 36th Japan Academy Prize for Best Picture and Best Director, The Kirishima Thing
- plus the new film from the wildly prolific auteur Takashi Miike, the psycho killer-teacher horror film Lesson of the Evil, a return to the director’s signature gonzo schlockmeister approach.
For descriptions of and showtimes for all the films in the 2013 JAPAN CUTS Festival, and to buy tickets, click here.
