Miyamoto-cho is a community of Mom-and-Pop stores and family enterprises located near the center of Tokyo. Competition from supermarkets and shopping centers threatens the livelihoods of long-term residents. High land prices tempt owners to tear down old homes and replace them with apartment buildings; this in turn is changing the composition of the population. Against this backdrop, residents strive to maintain the close social ties, symbols of local identity, and community rituals that keep Miyamoto-cho from becoming just another mailing address. Theodore Bestor began his research here in 1979. His prize winning book of the same name is available through Stanford University Press. This documentary is one of a series depicting the variety of life in today's Japan in the context of human problems common to all industrial nations. A comprehensive study guide is available.
When comedians draw on the family to make people laugh, everyone is concerned. This documentary looks at everything that is horrifying or hilarious in the family: from the "new generation" fathers to the dictates of the perfect mother, as well as the taboos of parenthood, unmanageable teenagers, and unbearable mothers-in-law.
ONLY IN THEATERS, a film by actor/director Raphael Sbarge, is an intimate and moving journey taken with the Laemmle family, spanning nearly three years of challenges, losses, and personal triumphs.
After a spell cast by Grandma Faraway, the oldest son of a small family encounters the ghost of his late Grandma Maria still living in her old house, and they chat as they used to.
A sensitive heart-warming story of an Indian transman's acceptance, by himself and his family. Merlin, born as a girl, felt right from his childhood that he was trapped in the wrong gender.
World War II comes to an end. Tokyo is a destroyed place, without law, driven by hunger and greed. From over 100,000 pages of declassified CIA documents and hours of newly discovered footage, recorded by American occupation charges and private individuals, the documentary shows Tokyo during this crucial year, Year Zero.
In Papua New Guinea, pig tusks and shell money are currencies which can buy most things. Henry Tokubak’s dream is to create the first bank where traditional money counts as legal tender.
IDFA and Canadian filmmaker Peter Wintonick had a close relationship for decades. He was a hard worker and often far from home, visiting festivals around the world.
Welcome to ISAN, Thailand's forgotten frontier, where Lao, Thai and Cambodian folkloric traditions have conspired to create a mystifying pageantry of music and dance still relatively unknown to outsiders.
This film is an in-camera portrait of my niece, Mia Larose (who was six months old at the time) captured during a winter family reunion in Lac Saint-Charles, Québec.
When cocky military lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee and his co-counsel, Lt. Cmdr. JoAnne Galloway, are assigned to a murder case, they uncover a hazing ritual that could implicate high-ranking officials such as shady Col.
Ramses is a "life organs" smugler and a millionaire. He wishes to have the tower of Babel rebuilt and hires a detective to find the architect who disappeared with the original plans.
Based on the character Rika-chan from Takara Tomy's long-running line of girls' toys, this is the third installment in the OVA series "Rika-chan" that aired in the 1990s.
Naples, 1959. Pure Mathematics professor Renato Caccioppoli, Bakunin's grandson, is a tortured soul. Recently discharged from the psychiatric hospital, left by his wife, and increasingly disillusioned with academia and the Communist Party, he lives his last days with painful detachment.
Count Dracula, a 15th-century prince, is condemned to live off the blood of the living for eternity. Young lawyer Jonathan Harker is sent to Dracula's castle to finalise a land deal, but when the Count sees a photo of Harker's fiancée, Mina, the spitting image of his dead wife, he imprisons him and sets off for London to track her down.
Writes Kuchar: "It was my 50th birthday this year (1992) and my friend's birthday, so I explored our position in time and dusty place with a prognostication on future inertia.
Ash, a handsome, shotgun-toting, chainsaw-armed department store clerk, is time warped backwards into England's Dark Ages, where he romances a beauty and faces legions of the undead.
Comments
Have you watched Neighborhood Tokyo yet? What did you think about it?
