JAPANESE CULTURAL EVENTS
JAPAN FEST
The best and most comprehensive Japanese cultural event in Atlanta. Come to see us on Saturday & Sunday (September 25 & 26) from 10am to 5pm.
Enjoy Arts, Craft, Martial Arts, Fashion, Food and Traditions from Japan.
The Japan Fest is located at Stone Mountain Park
JAPANESE MOVIES
Movie Director Elmer Bowman, an Atlanta Resident and Japanese student of the Language Institute of Atlanta has made an interesting movie about Japan. You may look at the trailer by clicking on this link.
2005
February 3The latest film by Kinji Fukasaku, director of Battle Royale.The film follows the life of Tokiko, a girl from a poverty-stricken family who comes to serve as a maid at a geisha house. After years of admiring the lives of the geisha for whom she works, and dreaming of becoming one herself in order to help her family, she eventually is trained as a geisha and makes her debut under the professional name "Omocha" (Toy). The film vividly depicts the everyday life of geisha, and their complex relationships with customers and with each other. The film's title is in homage to Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion. A lyrical and compelling story of women in post-war Japan. (Color, 1999, 115 min)
February 10Written and directed by one of Japan's most outstanding directors, Hirokazu Koreeda. The story takes place in Limbo, a way station where the newly dead are invited to choose their happiest memory. Recreated on film by the Limbo staff, this memory will erase all others, and become the one they take with them to eternity. Most of the dead choose easily, but some have trouble and one refuses outright. The staff work to help their clients achieve the blissful release the choice will give them, and the same time they try to deal with their own feelings about love, loss and memory. (Color, 1998, 118 min)
February 17Written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, well known for horror films like Kyua (Cure, 1997). In Charisma, Yabuike is a police detective who inadvertently causes the death of a hostage. On leave until the scandal dies down, he makes his way to a mountain forest. There he discovers a single tree and around it a medical life-support system. The tree—named Charisma—is the center of a battle between Kiriyama, a young man who wants to save it, and Jimbo, a botanist who sees it as a monster that will destroy the forest. Yabuike is baffled by all this, but again finds himself in the position of making a life-or-death choice. Charisma stars Koji Yakushi, who was also in The Eel and Shall We Dance. (Color, 2000, 103 min)
February 24The third film in director Seijun Suzuki's "Taisho trilogy" (with Zigeurnerwiezen, 1980 and Kageroza (Mirage theater, 1981). The Taishô period, 1912-1927, was an era both of increasing liberality and the inexorable rise of militarism. The film is loosely based on the life of painter Yumeji Takehisa (1884-1934). In a dreamlike series of interconnected vignettes, Yumeji drifts from one beautiful woman to another. Stunning, imagistic and evocative, the film features an appearance by Tamasaburo Bando, one of the kabuki theater's most well known female-role specialists (onnagata). (Color, 1991, 128 min)