Ryo Kase

Explore the lively city where anything is possible, which sets the unusual and imaginative tone for three short films from visionary directors.

Like Someone in Love, named after Ella Fitzgerald’s jazz standard, is a droll, elegant and playful film preoccupied with identities mistaken and assumed, laced with references to the films of Yasujirō Ozu. Akiko, a pretty and slightly distant sociology student works nights as a high-class escort. Instead of studying for her exams and meeting her grandmother, she reluctantly goes to the house of her latest client, the retired sociology professor Takashi. Next morning, she allows him to give her a ride to university where they cross paths with her volatile boyfriend, Noriaki who assumes that the kind old man is Akiko's grandfather. An odd role-playing routine begins, until the hoax is discovered.

Gus Van Sant directs this complex romance-drama that follows the first love between two teenagers dealing with grief and mortality.

Thirty-six days, 21,000 Japanese and 6,800 Americans dead, and thecourse of a world war and of global history changed. Academy Awardwinner Steven Spielberg (Schindler's List) teams with another Oscarwinner, Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby, Unforgiven), to tell theunforgettable story of the World War II battle for the island of IwoJima in an epic two feature film story. On both sides, tens o...

A famous soprano travels to South America to do a private concert for a rich Japanese businessman, where she becomes trapped in a hostage situation.

War photographer W. Eugene Smith travels back to Japan in 1971 where he documents the devastating effect of mercury poisoning in coastal communities.