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Ghada: Songs of Palestine

In July 1988, Mizue Furui was in the Gaza Strip and West Bank with her camera as a rookie freelance journalist. Covering the Palestinian condition, she became acquainted with Ghada Ageel, a 23-year-old teacher at an elementary school, in November 1993 and started shooting her life up to when she turned 35. The 12 years Furui spent shooting still and video images has borne fruit in a documentary titled "Ghada -- Songs of Palestine," which will be released in Uplink Theater in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, in May as a rare report on women in the traditionally male-oriented Palestinian society.

Ghada: Songs of Palestine

NR 2006
The Two Lives of Li Ermao

Filmed over 17 years across Southern China, this remarkable film is an intimate and heart-wrenching portrait of Li Ermao, a transgender migrant worker, who performs in clubs looking for love and acceptance. Living as a “ladyboy” with a string of boyfriends, she faces repeated encounters of prejudice and aggression with equal measures of resilience and vulnerability. With a flair for the dramatic and her budding career as a popstar, Ermao’s story takes many dramatic twists and surprising turns as she moves between the urban and the rural, searching for identity and fighting for a better life.

The Two Lives of Li Ermao

7.5 2019
Sometimes, Beauty Lies Along the Journey

Twenty years ago, at eighteen, Seonyoung suffered a severe spinal injury in a fall. Her family sold their home and shop in Incheon to cover medical bills, moving to her father's hometown of Cheongju. There, tragedy compounded: her father struggled with alcoholism, her mother's health failed from hard labor, and her brother developed a mental illness after a traumatic military incident. Now, Seonyoung studies for the civil service exam, hoping to pass and finally return to Incheon to reclaim the life and memories left behind.​

Sometimes, Beauty Lies Along the Journey

NR 2025
The Departure

An intimate character study of the complex figure Ittetsu Nemoto, an aimless and rebellious former punk rocker-turned-Buddhist priest. He is renowned in Japan for saving the lives of countless suicidal men and women through his wise and compassionate counsel. But Nemoto is now approaching middle-age with a wife and young boy of his own, when he learns his life is at risk from heart disease, compounded by the heavy emotional workload of supporting those who no longer want to live. When saving others takes such a toll, can he find the resiliency to save himself?

The Departure

6.8 2017
Nuchigafu - Life is a Treasure

A feature-length documentary that witnesses twenty-seven survivors of the Battle of Okinawa break their silence to testify the truth about the tragedy of “gyokusai,” forced group suicide, of Korean “military laborers” and “comfort women” brought from Korea. Just how were Okinawa citizens pressured and forced to commit group suicide in the final hours of the Pacific War, and what led to the near complete destruction of Korean military laborers and comfort women? Twenty years in the making since 'Song of Ariran -voices from Okinawa' (1991), Park Soo-nam’s third documentary returns to the subject of Korean military laborers and comfort women in Okinawa.

Nuchigafu - Life is a Treasure

NR 2012
(((O)))

A snooze alarm clock cannot wake a sleepy person. The bell of the alarm clock hence becomes a hypnotic trigger. Such an ordinary sound is redefined in our drowsy moments, and we are also liberated from the sounds that condition our lives—queue management systems, electric scooters, air raid drills, and public demonstrations. These sounds are released from the soft soil of our consciousness and grow into a new scene. And we sail with those who cannot be awakened on a boat drifting off course into a new realm projected by frequency. This is a film you can watch with your eyes closed.

(((O)))

NR 2022
After the Riots, Before the Liberation

2019 in Hong Kong, protests become our daily life. The stuffs in the streets after each protest are changing our urban landscape, and they become the view of our everyday life. Graffitis on walls, unscrewed railings, bricks, respirators, safety goggles. Everything records what has happened in the city and witnesses our beliefs. I walked through the streets with my camera after protests. Mr. LIU Yi Chang let the objects tell the story in his nouveau roman short story, Riot, in 1968. Likewise, I let the objects play the narrators and tell us about the protests. Moreover, there are conversations and dialectic between different narrators…

After the Riots, Before the Liberation

NR 2020
Zhou Lan-Ping – His Life and Music

Zhou Lan-Ping, who wrote the renowned Mandarin pop song ‘Green Island Serenade’ and the score of the acclaimed Chinese musical film The Love Eterne, is one of the most celebrated Chinese composers in modern times. Through old friends and colleagues’ recollection, commentaries from experts in the fields and academic researches, together with historical photos and audio-visual materials, this documentary explores this musician’s life and music and pays tribute to his contribution to the Chinese film and pop industries.

Zhou Lan-Ping – His Life and Music

NR 2013
Slum

Originally commissioned to record urban redevelopment in Osaka’s Kamagasaki district, Hideo Arai transcends reportage to capture a haunting portrait of displacement during Japan’s economic miracle. With a dissonant score by experimental composers Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yuji Takahashi, the film juxtaposes the brutal reality of shantytown "barracks" against the state's modernization projects. Slum remains a visceral critique of social erasure and a vital, observational work of Japanese documentary film.

Slum

NR 1961
Dino and Friends' Expedition to Samcheok

Kang Eun-bin, a youth climate activist who faced legal battles for protesting coal exports to Vietnam, leads a new fight against South Korea's final coal power project. In spring 2024, Kang and fellow Youth Climate Emergency Action members journey to Samcheok, Gangwon Province. With one plant already operational and another nearing completion, they race against time to halt the country's last coal-fired power plant construction. Joining forces with local activist 'Kim Gong-ryong' and his friends, these determined young advocates embark on a crucial mission. As the September 2024 deadline looms, can this coalition of passionate youth succeed in stopping the coal-fired plant and changing the course of South Korea's energy future?

Dino and Friends' Expedition to Samcheok

NR N/A
City of Outlanders

"Gunsan is a city of outlanders that has experienced waves of deterioration and revivals. Gunsan, a sparse area prior to 1910, opened doors for workers from all over Korea after it was exploited for rice harvesting during the Japanese colonial period. After liberation, the American military moved in along with large conglomerates that came to build factories, but they are now all shutting down. What remained from this history made the topography and landscape of the town. In the film, cameras float around the lonely landscape of Gunsan. A dancer from Switzerland named Anna mourns the scenes of Gunsan with sorrowful gestures, new musicians in town write a piece of music called City of Outlanders in lament

City of Outlanders

NR 2023
A film of TAMA

A documentary featuring the band Tama who created a sensation in 1990. They enjoyed great success, but disbanded after one of the members left. All four former members are continuing with music in their own styles. The film focuses on the three former members: Ishikawa Koji, Takimoto Koji, and Chiku Toshiaki. The film carefully captures the musicians who keep creating and expressing music through their own unique lives that still mesmerizes audiences. The director Imaizumi Rikiya is a rising star whose past independent work has won many awards at Japan's film festivals. It is his first documentary and a debut for a commercial film.

A film of TAMA

NR 2010
Songs Still Sung: Voices from the Tsunami Shores

In this documentary film, a companion to the book, Arai interviews five women from Ofunato, ages 79 to 100, who have survived as many as three tsunami in the past century! They talk about their childhood memories, their fortitude in the face of war and natural disaster, and the extraordinary depth of spoken Kesengo. Director Suzuki Yoi’s rich poetic sensibility offers a vision of humanity in all its complexity, as the film weaves together their Takuboku translations, poetry by the women themselves, and local songs. Their stories and their language will become a part of everyone who listens to their voices

Songs Still Sung: Voices from the Tsunami Shores

NR 2020
HOMECOMING

In a city that worships money, there is a group of people who still insist on living the philosophy of "people are not living on food alone." Instead of choosing to live in seclusion, they choose to actively enter the world, improve their hearts, and influence others through artistic creation. Their innovation has not only driven the art world in Hong Kong but more importantly, through their enthusiasm for creation, they have made us understand that as long as we have a "heart", no matter how difficult the environment is, we can persist in a "love".

HOMECOMING

NR 2014
One Hundred Years and Hope

In a country ruled by the Liberal Democratic Party, running on austerity and neoliberal ambitions, for most of its postwar years, gender and economic inequalities have become increasingly acute in Japan. Takashi Nishihara, a filmmaker who has been following the youth protests in Japan notices that there is one party that seems to be raising issues of gender and economic in the political sphere, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), a party about to enter its hundredth year and consistently burdened by its historical connotations. Though an outsider of the party, Nishihara gained unprecedented access to the JCP and driven by his interest in the younger party members who find hope in the JCP, the resulting documentary goes beyond party politics and observes the current grassroots leftist movements in Japan. It also becomes witness to the larger and deep-seated patriarchal system that continues to quell momentums of hope.

One Hundred Years and Hope

NR 2022
Women's Gukgeuk: Enduring on the Edge of Time

Cho Young-sook, who has continued the tradition of women's gukgeuk for 74 years, has two brilliant students. Park Su-bin has worked as a female performer who plays male roles in women's gukgeuk for more than 20 years. Hwang Ji-young was raised as a female gukgeuk actress. They are running a women's gukgeuk production center and are struggling to continue the momentum of women's gukgeuk, which is losing popular interest. However, it is not easy to continue performing women's gukgeuk, and the two are changing their minds more and more. The two, who want to make a big stage with women's gukgeuk even once before Cho Young-sook passes away, prepare for a performance of "Legendary Chunhyangjeon," thinking that it is their last performance. However, it is not easy to perform in the absence of funding. Park Su-bin and Hwang Ji-young, as third-generation women gukgeuk artists, spend their days searching for teachers, recruiting them, and scrambling to raise funds for the performances.

Women's Gukgeuk: Enduring on the Edge of Time

5.7 2025