Discover Movies

At 3,776 m high, Mt. Fuji is Japan's highest mountain. With nothing comparable surrounding it, the beautifully shaped Mount Fuji towers in splendid isolation and has become the symbol of Japan. But do you know the real beauty of Mount Fuji? NHK knows Mt. Fuji as well as anyone. Masterfully capturing Mt. Fuji in high-definition, this program presents Mt. Fuji as a splendid visual poem. Sheathed in orange, red, brown, blue, white, black and sometimes shimmering like a diamond, Mt. Fuji shows her many faces, which change with the time of day, season and weather. In this program, you will see and enjoy Mt. Fuji as you never have before.

This documentary is about a suspicious death of a first lieutenant Kim Hoon occurred at Panmunjom in Feburary 1998. Without clear justification, his death was made into a suicide case, leavng the truth unrevealed.

Notes Unheard follows a young Chinese violist studying in the UK while remaining closely connected to his father in China. Through calls, rehearsals, visits, and repeated conversations, subtle shifts gradually emerge within their relationship.

A half-hour archival documentary on the film's production.

Naomi Kawase goes to the south of Japan in search of her family origins on Amami Island, with her four-year-old son Mitsuki. They meet parents, chat with the island’s inhabitants, eat traditional goat soup, observe a total solar eclipse. By reconnecting the threads of her family history, Naomi Kawase gradually fills the void left by her parents' abandonment.

The easternmost fishing town in China sits on the cusp of radical change, as this quietly devastating film details. Once a major hub for the Chinese fishing industry, Stone Town is facing seismic change. With its economic bedrock at risk, the small, secluded town is turning towards tourism as a way to support its local population. Jing Guo and Dingding Ke’s film balances intimate portraits of the townsfolk, whose lives are impacted by the coming change, with a wider perspective on the modernisation project driven by Xi Jinping’s government. The filmmakers capture the anxiety, sorrow and confusion of the people, in tandem with a perspective on a burgeoning environmental crisis, the ramifications of political turbulence and injustice at the way rapid modernisation impacts everyday lives. Stone Town is a compelling portrait of a world where feelings of despair and frustration are drowned by late-night drinks and non-stop karaoke singing in dingy bars.

An unfinished housing complex has been abandoned. The imagined future from the past is taken over by foliage and wildlife.

Atelier Yamanami is a care facility for the disabled located in Koka, Shiga Prefecture in Japan. Currently, 88 users are registered as artists, all of whom possess a unique way of expressing themselves through various media and whose works are highly valued abroad. This documentary explores these artists' "relationship between their mental states and their art."

A speculative fiction about the invented city of Chin Kong; which is the imagination of Hong Kong in its dystopic future through the lens of political pessimism.

A fire burns in the dark. This film follows four voices speaking of their connection to nature. From different lands, they meet online to share memories and sensations. Amid urban birds, smog, clichéd forests, and landscapes of development, the film traces the feeling called 'connection' and the layers of fantasy around it.

Based on 50 years of footage shot in Africa, director Susumu Hani's latest work vividly shows the wisdom of the animals and the circle of life that they weave together. The director himself stands in the same line as the animals and questions life, death, freedom, and what it means to be human.

Documentary short on the military training for the 1989 freshmen of Beijing Broadcasting College.

The Land in the Middle of the Pond makes reference to the 1950’s forced displacement of the Atayal Qara community from their ancestral territory for the construction of the Shimen Reservoir – now the main water supply for Northern Taiwan. Throughout the video, we hear the voice of an elder who recalls the events which resulted in the forced displacement of her community and the impact of diaspora. In the video we see Ciwas tracing veins that run along her limbs like rivers. During the performance, later Ciwas and other Atayal women engage in an Atayal name exchange ritual, between person and plant. This customary ritual Ciwas employs like the tracing of her bloodline at the reservoir, as a symbolic act for reconnecting with her ancestral land while affirming her identity past, present and future.

Journalist Shu Meng-Lan takes her award-winning documentary series to the big screen. Filmed across 115 locations around the world over 15 years, Shu and her team have captured amazing footage of melting glaciers at the poles as well as the plight of helpless creatures living in those regions. Aiming to advocate for greater ecological awareness from a Taiwan perspective, the film is an important cautionary tale, reminding us that the fate of the polar regions is closely linked to our own.

There are nine dogs left in a redevelopment area somewhere in Namyangju, abandoned in the heatwave. The dogs under the sun wait for something, endlessly. (@byeollae_stardangdang)

This is the first work that marks the construction record of the Kasumigaseki Building, Japan's first skyscraper building. We will introduce the construction plans for the Kasumigaseki Building and safety measures for skyscrapers.

In a mixture between documentary and fiction, the film examines the diverse dimensions of collecting, exploring collections contained in private households and those in museums. In doing so, it highlights the intertwined relationship between people and things.

In 1922, General Prince Kamphaengphet Akarayothin, a pioneering figure in Thai cinema and the head of the Royal State Railway Department, established the Topical Film Service. This groundbreaking unit produced films to showcase government initiatives, royal events, and Thailand's tourism potential. It was one of the world's earliest state-run film departments, operating for a decade until the 1932 revolution gradually phased out its role.

Law Siufung is a professional bodybuilder, a passionate advocate for queer rights in Hong Kong, and a PhD candidate who has dedicated their life to challenging societal norms and binaries. This documentary follows Siufung's journey as they reflect on their experiences in Hong Kong and embark on a new chapter in the United States, continuing their fight to build a more inclusive and accepting society for all. As a genderfluid individual, poet, and intellectual with a deep interest in Buddhist philosophy, Siufung’s story is one of resilience and defiance. Director Jean-Luc, who has spent 15 years in Asia producing commercials and TV shows for major international clients, uses his expertise to explore the complexities of identity and the ongoing struggle for acceptance in this compelling and deeply personal narrative.

We are living in a time of catastrophe: global warming, extreme climate change, declining biodiversity, and the threat of extinction. These crises raise the need for a fundamental reflection on anthropocentrism and the relationship between humans and non-humans. Within this context, Human Discord Rhapsody imagines a world without us and emphasizes that the world we live in is more than a human world. Snails and ants imagine and sing about a world without us and a world beyond humans, respectively.

A live rendition of Flood, recorded on 3 May 2001 at Koenji 20000v.

Beatrice records her experiences of gender confirmation surgery, and meditates on what it means to be a woman in this honest and very entertaining autobiographical documentary.

Throughout the recent months of protests against the extradition law amendment bill, film crews have been following and filming various officers who were playing key roles in different Police operations, in order to record on film the adversities they faced when executing their duties as well as their emotional journeys along the way. In the documentary, these officers working in different posts and different levels in the Force also provide moving personal accounts of what they and their families have been through during these challenging times. Filming of the documentary started when a riot started in Admiralty on the evening of August 31, 2019, and concluded on on December 24, 2019. Over a span of four months, the most dangerous , divisive and chaotic period in Hong Kong was captured.

Concert film and documentary of Mami Kawada's second live tour "SAVIA" featuring the live concert and the documentary in the making of the film for her "SAVIA" tour. The concert film itself was filmed on August 8, 2008 at STUDIO COAST in Tokyo.

Fang Junrui is a 30-year-old hospital guard who lives in an old tiny flat with his parents in the center of Shanghai. He has been passionate about relic restoration but couldn’t find a related job for years. That has led to his disappointment in life. He routinely buys arts and history books but runs out of space to store them, irritating his parents who own the flat. Things started to change when a friend from the church and the film director came to his life. He felt like that his life was moving again at God’s will.

After a traumatic failure at a competition, platform diver Farrah retraces and reconciliates with her past through a stream-of-consciousness journey across space and time.

Four men are obliged to take a short-term counseling class about domestic violence. Each of them has problems like unbalanced communication, custody, marital conflicts and tension between the wife and the mother. The director documents the perpetrators with an in-depth perspective of how they've faced their family and conflicts and digs into the truth of love in the name of violence.

A verbose essay film, making a mountain out of a molehill. Due to Covid-19, exploratory field trips to the countryside turned into school trips. Just when we thought we were going to be bored through the trip, we noticed the "stalacitites" growing on the buildings of the school. And so, as we explored, a hidden ecosystem, hidden behind the neat facade of the school buildings, slowly unraveled. And of course, we didn't intend to stop at just finding them...

The clear record of a zoo's daily workings and the hardships of zookeepers.

This documentary sheds light on the lives of North Korean defectors in Europe. North Korean defectors who crossed the ideological boundary over to South Korea are often called forth to bear witness to the plight of North Korean society. Rather than creating a discourse about the recovery of divided culture, the focus has been very much on the conflict of ideology. The increasing number of North Korean defectors is a sign of victory. However, the film testifies that a growing number of people are leaving both Koreas behind.

In a Balinese village, families go to great trouble and expense for their extravagant cremation ceremony. They provide special foods to mourners and prepare a bounty of offerings for the deceased, from gifts of money to symbolic baskets. The atmosphere is almost festive as a shadow puppet show is performed for the entertainment of the deceased, inheritances are distributed, and musical processions of mourners walk the streets. Dead family members seem almost present as their bones are uncovered, washed, and arranged for cremation with accompanying prayer rites. During the cremation, the village is filled with smoke from enormous burning pyres shaped like bulls, as the souls of the dead are cleansed of impurity and then sent out to sea so that they may continue their journey to heaven. Shot in 16mm, the film documents and explains the intricacies of these funeral rites and Balinese-Hindu beliefs about death.

This essay film is about Hong Kong as a place, or rather as a series of places, each with their own series of histories. Mak is after public and private histories, and the ways they commingle, intertwine and sometimes even obliterate each other. Her materials are multiple: she takes what she calls “appropriated archival footage and propaganda films from the 60s and 70s done by the British Hong Kong Government," and cuts, loops, zooms, slows and manipulates them to make striking distortions. To these “official” materials, made strange through video manipulation, Mak adds black-and-white Super 8 video of her own, digitally altered to sometimes look battered and archival, highly worked into a beautifully ghostly, grainy, evanescently visible texture. Images are juxtaposed promiscuously in double and quadruple frames, often paired images of intangibly related material, elegantly matched to be thought provoking as well as to offer visual delight.

My father's attempt to reminisce by his childhood seaside became one of the most inexplicable experiences of his life. The film strips were buried for 28 days in vinegar, mud, cheese, nato beans, beer, and kimchi. The disintegrated imagery produced by the decomposition is reminiscent of the fragmentation of memory.

Lulu Ogawa's fascinating 1998 video documentary depicts a wide cross-section of Japanese transgendered people, from drag queens to FTMs to intersex activists to male transvestites. They tell familiar stories of exclusion and abuse while growing up, discuss the need for safe spaces where they can express their complex identities, and reveal the cost of black-market hormones and the physical pain of sex-reassignment surgery.

This work is a confession of the genre of video-through horror docs and its terminal situation. In a bleak location, the film expresses the resignation and apathy of young people

Yoshida is a “tears teacher.” A firm believer that weekly crying promotes healthier living, he’s made it his mission to make more people weep.

Weaving together folk tales from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s coming-of-age trilogy with her Grandfather’s memories of supernatural visitation in his home, Virada retraces the Chinese diaspora through the stories of mysterious occurrences that are passed down through generations.

A Globe in a Flat World (2016) follows a wanderer’s journey into an Augmented Reality simulation of Deoksu Gung, a traditional palace in Seoul. The interior of this treasured site is permanently closed to the public in real life and only accessible as an awkwardly compressed imagery of three-dimensional experience. Inside the AR space, the aimlessly drifting wanderer becomes bodiless, impeded to take a step. Unable to find a liminal space between corridors and rooms, the wanderer loses autonomy to exit.

For centuries, Tibetan nomads were the only inhabitants on the banks of the sacred Lake Kokonor—the Blue Lake—in Amdo (eastern Tibet). Starting in the 1990s, the area saw a dramatic rise in domestic tourism: It was not just the lake’s beauty that drew tourists but the Tibetan culture in general. This influx of tourists came at a cost: the locals now find themselves having to adapt to new roles in the tourism industry. This glimpse at the Kokonor community examines the transformation of the lives of the Tibetans who live there.

Election is about the Legislative Council Election in 2004, focused on three geographical constituencies: Hong Kong Island, Kowloon East and the New Territories East. The film follows various activities, from the submission of candidacy, pledge ceremonies, interviews with candidates to lobbying, debate at forums, voting and vote counting, etc. The film reflects the problems Hong Kong faces on the road to democracy and different facets of Hong Kong politics.

A documentary about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.

Held every October in the city of Matsuyama, the Dogo Autumn Festival is one of the most violent religious festivals in Japan. Eight teams of men carry massive wooden shrines weighing up to a ton, making them collide in a holy battle that leaves many injured and exhausted.

China is currently marked by a phase of rapidly growing urbanization. The film in this context deals with two particular cities. Yum en a derelict ghost town and Or dos a mythic city of the future,both are deserted. They exist because of completely different reasons. The film shows through impressive images how these two cities and the relation of inhabitants to these cities are developing in China in times of urban growth.

One Tree Three Lives, an intimate film on the novelist Hualing Nieh Engle, who has been a major influence on generations of writers in the Chinese Diaspora, and beyond. The director has known the author and her family since the Seventies. The film reveals a woman of unusual charisma, integrity and determination, and a person in continual exile. She is the author of 24 books. She also co-founded the International Writing Program in Iowa, USA, with her now deceased husband, the poet Paul Engle. One Tree Three Lives is also their love story.

Aisha McAdams, a former competitive runner turned photographer, embarks on a journey to document the triumphs and struggles of famed ultra trailrunners, including Jim Walmsley and Eszter Csillag. Traveling to mythical races—the Western States Endurance Run in the mountains of eastern California, the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in the French Alps—the film marvels at athletes who maintain their intensity as they run 100 miles of mountain trails while climbing thousands of vertical feet.

This is a film about Choi Yuen Village, documenting villagers’ lives in the summer and autumn of 2009. Suddenly, weekly meetings, guided tours, protests, and ambiguous government consultations entered their routines. They had to recount their personal histories and the meaning of life. The common belief that protests were only about money began to loosen. The word "agriculture" reemerged for Hongkongers. The timeline depicted in the film leads up to the peak of the anti-high-speed rail protests around the Legislative Council. In the end, the railway was decided to build. In spring and summer 2010, villagers searched for land and negotiated with the government to rebuild their homes and lifestyle, valuing community, and coexistence with nature. What sustains their deep connection to land and life?

A cultural worker turned farmer extols the healing power of nature, a sea-diving model tackles marine pollution, a wildlife buff practises ‘wellness photography’, and a real estate agent channels his love of birds into paintings.

In 2021, an orchestrated coup d’état in Myanmar shuts down the country. Gao Gao, who can no longer go to school, spends his days with his friends in the village, passing the time by playing with toy guns, going through life as if nothing has changed despite the unrest around him.