Collective experimental film by Team 8mm TENGOKU.
Social & External
The people behind it
Etsuko Matsushita
Murakami Naho
Kumiko Kono
Kiyoko Ohara
Yoko Usui
Utako Koguchi
Masami Takashige
Outdoor Enthusiast, Content with his life is suddenly unplugged from his ‘Reality’
a young timid boy who is doubtful about faith and religion is beaten by curiosity and ends up wandering into a peculiar church and encountering a celestial yet godlike girl.
When Adrian's friend denies him a loan of money, a rampage of thoughts starts within him. Why won't Jacob lend him any money? And why won't he lend any to him, specifically?
An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.
A triple exposure on EXR 50D 16mm film: two layers shot in summer, and the third captured on the cusp of winter. A collection of statues fading in and out of consciousness, around the Weissensee lake in northeast Berlin, where the filmmaker lives.
The Chosen One is questioned about his destiny to save the world from everything.
Before the freeze, there was beautiful garden. "Before the Freeze" is a short psychological thriller with experimental elements, about an overstressed, newly-single mother, her daughter, their dog, and what happens one afternoon when a friend comes over. "Before the Freeze" is Tenley E. Raj's debut film. Written, directed, shot, and edited and by Tenley E. Raj.
Throughout a night out in downtown Tijuana, Laura waits for her destiny to arrive.
A vent in the form of an experimental short film, Lip Balm is about finding ways to cope with what can feel like the lowest moments of one's life.
History as immersion and dispersion in the fragments of the past, a visionary journey accompanied by the voice of Patty Pravo. Presented at the Taormina Festival '97.
The lives of both a train conductor and a cross dresser become mixed within one another.
Swain is inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe, features a dreamlike narrative of a young man’s ritualized rejection of heterosexuality, as a mysterious woman in white gossamer pursues him through a ruined landscape.
Kaito lost his sister who was his lover in his childhood. He severed all contact with the outer world for twenty years and devoted his time to writing down memories of his sister. One day, a week before the manuscript is to be completed, a woman visits his room. She burns all his papers and takes him to the city to cut him off from his memories. Nevertheless, Kaito cannot stop writing about his sister. The woman decides to lead him on a journey to ultimate hell.
"In medical terminology, absence of genitalia in females is referred to as "gynatresia". In other words, an extreme defect that goes beyond a mere illness" Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
A person spends most of their life mourning the things they have lost, unable to move on. They frequent a silent but helpful medium and embark on a spiritual journey where they linger among their past lives.
July 21, 1958. Madrid wakes up to the news that a pawnbroker has been murdered in his shop. Soon, police finds that the victim's associate, his pregnant wife and their maid have been murdered as well in their own home across the street.
Haunted by flooding memories of their parents' verbal abuse, an insecure person decides to stop reflecting and start living the life they never knew they could have.
A journey to an unknown star, a children's theatre play, an untalented writer and the fear of becoming the worst version of oneself. A mixture of live-action footage and animated scenes. A stream of (un)conscious stereotypes.
Actor William Hartnell felt trapped by a succession of hard-man roles while wannabe producer Verity Lambert was frustrated by the TV industry's glass ceiling. Both of them were to find unlikely hope and unexpected challenges in the form of a Saturday tea-time drama. Allied with a team of unusual but brilliant people, they went on to create the longest running science fiction series ever made.
Feeling awkward and isolated, an imaginative and strong-willed teenage girl runs away from home with an older punk rock drifter.
Two co-workers, one a vain woman and the other an awkward teenager, share an increasingly bizarre relationship after becoming roommates.
Physically separated from her father and at odds with her distraught mother, a girl must negotiate her own passage to maturity.
Hirayama is content with his life as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine, he cherishes music on cassette tapes, books, and taking photos of trees. Through unexpected encounters, he reflects on finding beauty in the world.
A woman wakes up in the middle of the night on board a train, but she can't remember how she got there. Danger and suspense ensue.
At the end of WWII, Jimmy Picard, a Native American Blackfoot who fought in France, suffers from unexplainable symptoms and is admitted to a military hospital. When doctors suspect schizophrenia, an eccentric psychoanalyst takes up the case and starts a conversation with the veteran.
An odyssey through time and memory, centered on a place in New Jersey where—from wilderness, and then, later, from a home—love, loss, struggle, hope and legacy play out between couples and families over generations.
An urban legend says that lighting fireworks at an abandoned airfield will beckon the "summer ghost," a spirit that can answer any question. Three teenagers, Tomoya, Aoi, and Ryo, each have their own reason to show up one day. When a ghost named Ayane appears, she reveals she is only visible to those "who are about to touch their death." Compelled by the ghost and her message, Tomoya begins regularly visiting the airfield to uncover the true purpose of her visits.
A strange disturbance in the World of the Living sends Ichigo and Kon to the Soul Society, where the Seireitei has been devastated by an explosion of reishi and Rukia is missing. Stranger still, none of the Soul Reapers remember Ichigo, and they think he’s the one responsible for the destruction. Now on the run, Ichigo is forced into a lonely battle in order to find Rukia and stop the real culprits!
Eight visually rich vignettes drawn from Kurosawa’s own dreams—fox weddings and vanished orchards, a soldier’s ghosts, a walk through Van Gogh’s canvases, nuclear nightmares, and a water-mill utopia—meditate on childhood, art, mortality, and humanity’s uneasy bond with nature.
When 17-year-old Makoto Konno gains the ability to 'leap' backwards through time, she immediately sets about improving her grades and preventing personal mishaps. However, she soon realises that changing the past isn't as simple as it seems, and eventually, will have to rely on her new powers to shape the future of herself and her friends.
A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the lifecycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.
When a brilliant nine-year-old working in a sweatshop gets a chance to attend school, she must make a difficult choice for her and her sister's future.
In Japan's Aokigahara Forest, a troubled teacher meets a mysterious lost stranger who takes him on a life-changing journey of love and redemption.
A young girl tries to help her grandfather, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, navigate his increasing forgetfulness, and ends up going on a remarkable adventure with him.
A melancholy poet reflects on three women he loved and lost in the past: a mechanical performing doll, a Venetian courtesan, and the consumptive daughter of a celebrated composer.
An uninterrupted rehearsal of Chekhov's 'Uncle Vanya' plays out by a company of actors. The setting: their run-down theater with an unusable stage and crumbling ceiling. The play is shown act by act with the briefest of breaks to move props or for refreshments. The lack of costumes, real props and scenery is soon forgotten.
In a distinctly contemporary Tokyo that looks backwards to the city’s disappearing past, Yoko is a writer investigating the life of a modernist composer of the 1930s. She is pregnant by a man she does not want to marry and has found a kindred spirit in a used bookstore owner who aids her research.
The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.
