Japan: Hightech against earthquake (2018)

KANASHII YOKAN: The Life and Legacy of Yukiko Okada

Thirty years ago, idol Okada Yukiko jumped off the Sun Music agency building in a desperate attempt to take her own life. Unfortunately, she was successful. Outside of Japan, not much is known about Yukko, aside from her music and her death. In this documentary series, we will document her short life in its entirety, beginning from her birth and ending with her legacy beyond death.

Le Japon, l'empereur et l'armée

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Born In Summer

A filmmaker plays with diary-docu and fiction as his camera joins his ventures into a phone dating club. Bored to death, hormones running, and desperately wanting to talk to someone his own age (preferably a girl), he walks into a local phone dating club. Can he hook up with someone? Borrowing the form of a diary-movie, the director unfurls an unpredictable and imaginative look into his own persona. 8mm experimental film by Murakami Kenji, the film that made his name.

The Voyage of Bashô

A fictionalised documentary about the great Japanese poet Bashô (1644–1694), the spiritual father of haiku poetry. A monk, portraying the poet, journeys through Japan, following Bashô's journal and writing many of his haikus. A ruminant, poetic, Zen Buddhist observation of nature – a return to the lost paradise of unspoilt nature.

The History of the Pit Stop: Gone in Two Seconds

The mavericks who pioneered the modern pit stop made it a raceday staple that takes less than two seconds.

Zen, in Search of Enlightenment

A documentary exploring the rigorous training and meditation practices found at the Shōgen-ji, a Zen Buddhist monastery of the Rinzai school in Shimizu-ku, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan.

Citizen Kitano

Takeshi Kitano is an international icon. We know the actor, the multi-award-winning filmmaker, but many ignore his double personality: the crazy TV star, the street kid from Tokyo close to the Yakuza, and the political satirist who blasted taboos! Can we dream of a better guide to introduce us to the cultural history of Japan?

Samurai Headhunters

A documentary on the dark and brutal side of the Samurai warrior clans featuring the life of peasant Masa who is pressganged into the ruthless world of the Samurai.

Amazing Engineering: Knights Templar Castles

Looks at the engineering of the Knights Templar, the religious order that marked the rise of the Middle Ages, and their amazing buildings in the west of Europe.

Click to Ransom

A small rural hospital in Japan battles an international cybercriminal gang that is holding them ransom with their stolen patient data.

SEVEN

What caused Building 7 to collapse on 9/11? Dr. Leroy Hulsey from the University of Alaska Fairbanks may have the answer, following an exhausting four year engineering study.

Omoiyari

Violinist and songwriter Kishi Bashi travels on a musical journey to understand WWII era Japanese Incarceration, assimilation, and what it means to be a minority in America today.

Trains: Two Centuries of Innovation

Nearly 200 years ago, the train revolutionized our lives. It redrew the maps of states and nations, and changed concepts of distance and time like no other invention before. What visionaries imagined the development of the railroad? How did we get from the first chugging locomotives to the smooth giants of speed we see today? How does France's extensive rail network keep running smoothly, 24/7?

Ona Carbonell: Starting Over

In August 2020, Olympic artistic swimmer Ona Carbonell became a first time mother, an experience that reshaped her life overnight.

The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief

Welcome to The Great Happiness Space: Rakkyo Café. The club's owner, Issei (22), has a staff of twenty boys all under his training to become the top escorts of Osaka's underground love scene. During their training, they learn how to dress, how to talk, how to walk, and most importantly, how to fake relationships with the girls who become their source of income. Join us as Osaka's number one host boy takes us on a journey through the complex and heartrenching world of love for sale in the Japanese underground.

The Strait Guys

THE STRAIT GUYS follows Czech-born mining engineer, George, and his fast-talking protégé, Scott, along the proposed route of the InterContinental Railway through Alaska, to the Bering Strait and onward to Russia. The “Strait Guys” endeavor to convince international governments, corporations, and indigenous tribes to green-light their $100 billion railway project, which would provide ground-based infrastructure across the continents, relieve overcrowded Pacific ports, improve global supply chains, and ease tensions between the superpowers. The US and Russia have been successfully collaborating in space for decades. Now the Strait Guys are out to prove it is also possible down here on earth.

Reimagining A Buffalo Landmark

The Richardson Olmsted Campus, a former psychiatric center and National Historic Landmark, is seeing new life as it undergoes restoration and adaptation to a modern use.

Grandma's Eternal Forest

A 49 minutes documentary on the footsteps of 87 years old "Grandma" Kuniko Shiiba, perpetuating a 4000 years traditional and sustainable form of agriculture. Shohei SHIBATA followed her a whole year through the forest and its medicinal plants, fire spirits and mountains.

The Ukishima Maru Massacre

22nd of August, 1945. Japan lost the war and they loaded an 8,000 person Joseon laborer force onto a ship called the Ukisima to take them to the Busan Port. However, the ship sunk into the water due to an unknown blast. This is the story of thousands of Joseon people who dreamed of returning to their families and how they died.

Artifishal

Narratives of ecologists and conservationists are pitted against the human tendency to engineer and control in this probing documentary on the lucrative salmon-hatchery industry.

The Shogun

With cunning and courage the japanese warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu managed to unify Japan after 150 years of civil war.

White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Steven Okazaki presents a deeply moving look at the painful legacy of the first -- and hopefully last -- uses of nuclear weapons in war. Featuring interviews with fourteen atomic bomb survivors - many who have never spoken publicly before - and four Americans intimately involved in the bombings, White Light/Black Rain provides a detailed exploration of the bombings and their aftermath.

A Place of Our Own

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Queer Japan

Trailblazing artists, activists, and everyday people from across the spectrum of gender and sexuality defy social norms and dare to live unconventional lives in this kaleidoscopic view of LGBTQ+ culture in contemporary Japan.