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Events in Greece |
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JAPAN at the 9th Thessaloniki Documentary Festical
 This is the true story of a 13-year-old Japanese girl who never returned home one dark November night in 1977. Decades later, her parents discover the bizarre truth – their daughter was abducted by North Korean spies.The film is a human drama of a mother and father’s grief and endless devotion, framed in a moving 30-year long search for their vanished child.An ordinary banker and housewife get caught up in an extraordinary international conflict; their personal tragedy lies at the center of one of today’s most talked-about, most emotionally-charged human rights and political crises in the East.
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 In 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, the conservative Japanese government is pressing ahead with plans to revise the nation’s constitution and jettison its famous no-war clause,Article 9. This documentary places the ongoing debate over the constitution in an international context:What will revision mean to Japan’s neighbors, Korea and China? How has the US-Japan military alliance warped the constitution and Japan’s role in the world? How is the unprecedented involvement of Japan’s Self-Defense Force in the occupation of Iraq perceived in the Middle East?
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 I had initially intended this film to trace the period from the day I conceived until the birth of the new life. But as the work progressed, I came to the understanding that this was not a story of just this one life. Soon the film elevated itself to depict the knot between living beings. I realized that my ambiguous question of why people are all alone was fundamentally incorrect in the way it was set up.We living beings have lived and let live in relationships since long long ago. Conceiving a life means sharing one’s life.And the moment the child left my body, I consumed the singular internal organ that had connected me with it. It tasted a little bloody and warm.
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 In September 2003, Edward Said, the Palestinian American and eminent intellectual, died. In the spring of 2004, Said’s grave was placed, not in New York where he had lived most of his adult life, not in Palestine where he was born, but in the small Lebanese town of Brummana.This film begins with the story of Said’s grave, symbolic of the complexities of his life. Guided by interviews with Arab, Israeli and American thinkers, Out of Place is a journey through the memories and legacies of Edward Said, an exploration of the prospects for the reconciliation and coexistence that Said fought for throughout his life.
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 The word “Bakushi” means the rope-master or the rope artist in Japanese bondage.They perform by using multiple pieces of rope “to tie” or “to bind” the bodies of models for perfomances, magazines and videos that specialize in S&M. This documentary deals with the lives of these peculiar professionals in the Japanese bondage known as “Kinbaku”.
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 The film introduces an extraordinary hidden world of Japanese nightlife in Osaka’s Cafe Rakkyo and the denizens of this glamorous demimonde, dedicated to partying till they drop. Presided over by the charismatic, enigmatic Issei, the number one ‘host boy’ in town, the club offers a new twist on the ancient geisha tradition. Glamorous host boys make beautiful young women laugh, feel good about their lives– and pay handsomely for their pleasure. In this secret, outcast society of wealthy young people, money seems to mean easy gratification. But all these stylish players have to pay for their pleasures, and they can cost more than money.
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