Legendary Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai (SWORD OF DOOM, HARAKIRI, RAN) delivers another masterful performance as Tadao, a cantankerous old fisherman living with his young granddaughter Haru (Eri Tokugawa) in a quiet seaside hamlet—until Haru decides she’d like to move to Tokyo. Bitterly offended, Tadao sets off with a guilt-stricken Haru on a journey to find his long-lost, far-flung siblings in the hopes that one will take him in. With references to Ozu’s TOKYO STORY, Kobayashi’s film movingly examines family dynamics and the unraveling social contract in contemporary Japan. “A quietly affecting modern day masterpiece that will break your heart many times over.”—Dustin Chang, Twitch Film (134 mins.)

Sponsored by Portland Japanese Garden.

At the Dome Fuji Station, deep in the Antarctic—where temperatures are so frigid not even a virus can survive—eight researchers live and work together studying deep-core ice. In such an isolated environment, sometimes a man’s tether to reality can be as tenuous as ... ramen noodles. In this hilarious comedy based on a true story, a chef named Nishimura (played by Masato Sakai) becomes the research team’s linchpin, sustaining their appetites and their sanity by cooking up scrumptious dishes, from sushi and ramen to lobster, matsuzaka beef, and foie gras. Director Shûichi Okita’s debut feature joins the ranks of BABETTE’S FEAST and LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE as a foodie classic guaranteed to make your mouth water. (125 mins.)

Sponsored by Shigezo Restaurant.

Pyuupiru is an acclaimed young transgendered artist from Tokyo whose eye-popping avant-garde work spans the genres of photography, fashion design, performance, and installation art. Uncomfortable with the male body in which he was born, Pyuupiru uses his body as an evolving canvas of his artwork and his artwork as a way in which to locate his true sense of self. Matsunaga’s intimate documentary charts Pyuupiru’s physical, psychological, and artistic metamorphosis across eight years, as he endures sexual reassignment surgery, a broken heart, and painful plastic surgery, culminating in his heartbreakingly personal performance installation at the Yokohama Triennale. (91 mins.)

With community support from QDoc: Portland Queer Documentary Film Festival.

In honor of our sister city colleagues at the Sapporo International Short Film Festival in Sapporo, Japan, we present a program of short films culled from the festival. The program includes Yuki Ono’s FACE TRIP (2010), chronicling by daily photographs a young man’s travels around East Asia; Sayaka Fukui’s NEVER LET ME GO (2010), about a novelist who receives a letter whose contents will affect not only her writing but her life; Yoshiko Misumi’s GOOGURI GOOGURI (2010), the animated story of a hidden world opened up by a secret word shared between a girl and her grandfather; Shunsuke Minowa’s A BEAUTIFUL GIRL’S NOSE (2009), depicting the misadventures of a girl with a hypersensitive sense of smell; Masaki Okuda’s A GUM BOY (2010), the animated story of Chewie Boy, who alienates his friends and classmates through his love of chewing gum; and Dean Yamada’s BICYCLE (2009), which follows quiet, passive Mamoru as he loses first his job and then, piece by piece, his beloved bicycle. (76 mins.)

Sapporo International Short Film Festival organizers Toshiya Kubo and Takashi Homma will introduce the program.

Join us for a post-film reception in the Portland Art Museum’s Andrée Stevens Room, hosted by the Portland-Sapporo Sister City Association.

This sprawling, Altman-esque drama weaves together five discrete stories centered around a gloomy New Year’s Eve in the economically depressed shipbuilding town of Kaitan. A laid-off shipyard worker watches the sun rise with his sister whom he can no longer support; a stubborn old woman refuses to sell her home even as the neighborhood around her is razed for redevelopment; a planetarium worker struggles to connect with his cheating wife and distant son; a gas cylinder businessman wreaks abusive havoc in his own household; and a lonely streetcar driver spies his estranged son in the sea of faces flowing past him on the street. Together, the stories form a richly detailed tapestry of working-class hope and survival in the midst of a bleak winter and a bleaker recession. (152 mins.)

Yojin (Kenichi Matsuyama), a young man living with his grandmother in the rural Aomori Prefecture, struggles to carry on his family’s organic vegetable farm, hampered by a developmental disability. He uses multiple alarm clocks to keep him on task throughout the day, charts his hourly progress on a whiteboard, and gardens according to tape-recorded instructions left behind by his late grandfather. His clumsy attempts to woo Machiko (Kumiko Aso), a young teacher recently arrived from Tokyo, are rebuffed, until he discovers a solution: dousing himself in pesticides from his garden quiets the buzzing in his head, making him behave more calmly and thus more attractively to Machiko. Stunningly filmed in the Japanese countryside, BARE ESSENCE OF LIFE is a quirky, surreal meditation on the love/hate relationship between humans and the natural world. (120 mins.)

The latest film from master provocateur Sion Sono (SUICIDE CLUB, LOVE EXPOSURE) takes as its hero the milquetoast fish store owner Shamoto (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), despised by both his teenage daughter and his new second wife. Into their lives strolls the forcefully charming Murata (Denden), the successful owner of a huge tropical fish emporium who takes Shamoto as protégé. But Murata’s business tactics are more than merely aggressive—they’re deadly. When Murata kills a business associate (not for the first time) and blackmails Shamoto into helping dispose of the body, Shamoto is pulled into a vortex of violence and carnage from which he seems powerless to escape. Sono imbues his splatterfest with a strong dose of social satire, painting a portrait of humanity as hard-hitting as it is stomach-churning. “A deliciously warped wallow in misogyny, depravity, and dead-eyed manipulation.”—New York Times (144 mins.)

Mature audiences.

Kinema Nippon is a series of fundraising screenings of Japanese experimental films and video art designed to celebrate the country’s visionary cinema and to serve as a catalyst for cultural awareness and unity in the wake of Japanese relief efforts after the March earthquake and tsunami. Although varying greatly in their formal and aesthetic concerns, all of the short films rigorously reexamine the everyday through their respective experiments and innovations. Highlights include Takahiko Iimura’s deconstruction of early Japanese text, WHITE CALLIGRAPHY RE-READ (1967); Toshio Matsumoto’s split-screen filmic hallucination of the late ’60s underground, FOR THE DAMAGED RIGHT EYE (1969); and Tomonari Nishikawa’s in-camera manipulation of bustling metro hubs in SHIBUYA-TOKYO and TOKYO-EBISU (2010). (135 mins.)

Kinema Nippon is organized by Aily Nash and Nine Yamamoto-Masson.

All proceeds from the screening will be donated to the Japan Society’s Earthquake Relief Fund.

Mikio Kobayashi (Kenji Yamaguchi) owns and operates a small printing business out of his home, where he lives quietly with his beautiful second wife, young daughter, and divorced sister. The only noise in the Kobayashis’ lives is the rhythmic shuffle of the printer and the squawking of the local neighborhood watch about encroaching “foreigners” on the streets. One day, a stranger named Kagawa (Kanji Furutachi), claiming to be the son of an old family friend, shows up at their front door, stepping in to help when their only employee falls ill. Kagawa moves in. A few days later, Kagawa’s blond, salsa-dancing wife from Brazil—or is it Bosnia?—moves in as well. So begins the hilarious home invasion in director-screenwriter Koji Fukada’s satirical take on the fine line between Japanese hospitality and xenophobia. (96 mins.)

Sponsored by Lane Powell PC.

During World War II, a young lieutenant named Kurokawa (Shima Onishi) returns from battle limbless, burn-scarred, and unable to speak. For his sacrifices, his country has decorated him as a living “War God,” hailed by his neighbors and family. At home, however, Kurokawa’s wife Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima) struggles with the “honor” of her duty to care for a handicapped husband who spits in her face, endlessly demands sex, and continues the tyrannical abuse of their pre-war relationship. Adapting Edogawa Rampo’s banned 1929 horror-fantasy short story, director Koji Wakamatsu (UNITED RED ARMY) presents a stunning critique of war waged in the name of nationalism and the hypocrisy of “patriotic duty,” expressed through a woman’s sado-masochistic relationship with her husband. “This masterpiece has the blunt force of a tank rolling over naked flesh.”—Hollywood Reporter (87 mins.)

Mature audiences.