Shinji Sōmai Trailers
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Shinji Sōmai (相米 慎二, Sōmai Shinji, 13 January 1948 – 9 September 2001) was a Japanese film director. He was born in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, and was brought up in Hokkaido. Somai began his career in 1975 as an assistant director with Nikkatsu Co., one of Japan's leading film production companies, after he dropped out of Chuo University.
Somai made made his debut as a director in 1980 with The Terrible Couple - an adaptation of a popular boys' manga of the time. The film deals with the trials and tribulations of adolescence, presaging a long thread of Somai works in which young people are called upon to test their capabilities while discovering the unreliable nature of adult society. In Somai's hands, children and teenagers are always treated and presented sympathetically and seriously.
An actor's director from the start, Somai's trademark was a use of long takes, usually involving constantly-moving and spectacularly sweeping shots, which he felt allowed his cast to achieve the proper mood for scenes which would have been ruined by excessively quick editing. Perhaps the most extraordinary use of this technique is to be found in his 1985 film Lost Chapter of Snow: Passion (one of three of his films released that year), in which Somai uses an apparently single fourteen-minute take to reveal a succession of significant events in one character's childhood.
The best of Somai's films often straddle genres, taking off in unpredictable directions toward stimulating destinations.
Somai directed 13 films between 1980 and 2000. He died of lung cancer at 53.
Most Popular Shinji Sōmai Trailers
Total trailers found: 22
04 June 1975
Naomi, who runs a boutique, is a lesbian and has been having homosexual relationships with her staff, Reiko, and a married woman, Miyako.
23 October 1976
Though his parents help him run the family business, Jun still feels persecuted by their love; when they bar him from meeting with his girlfriend, tensions increase.
19 December 1998
A salaryman faces a major life change as his firm undergoes financial difficulties. To add to his troubles, a man claiming to be his long-estranged father shows up at his house requesting shelter.
26 July 1980
Aspiring to be admitted to a good university and to become a lawyer, Tasiro Yuusuke, a tenth-grader from Kyushu, enrolls in a prestigious high school in Tokyo.
24 October 1987
A hulking man from the country pursues his beloved to the underworld of Tokyo nightclubs, where he finds work as a sideshow wrestler and becomes involved with a faded opera singer.
19 December 1981
A high-school girl inherits a declining yakuza organization, which seeks to repair its fortunes under her leadership.
31 August 1985
Offering a caustic immersion into the lives of disaffected junior high students on the cusp of adulthood, the film takes place over the 5-day period before, during, and after a ferocious, seemingly liberating typhoon, which six of the students endure while marooned in their school.
06 October 1979
A high school science teacher is the butt of all his students' jokes, until their bus is hijacked on a school trip.
03 March 1979
In the mid-1970s, a small group of friends are living in a Japanese town near an American air force base, their lives revolve around sex, drugs and rock 'n roll.
03 November 1979
Akira is haunted by a "bouncing ball" song that he remembers his mother singing when he was a small child, and now on the verge of a sexually active adulthood, he wants to find the origins of the song.
29 October 1983
A young man tries to overcome the hostility of his girlfriend's father, a tuna fisherman, by getting the father to teach him the trade's secrets.
21 December 1985
Iori, taken from an orphanage by a family for domestic work, runs away and is adopted and raised by two young men.
27 January 2001
A government employee meets a hostess of a "pink club," and together they set out on a journey.
03 August 1985
A call-girl named Yumi and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel.
20 March 1993
Physically separated from her father and at odds with her distraught mother, a girl must negotiate her own passage to maturity.
12 March 1994
A delightful and moving coming-of-age story. One summer, three young boys take an increasing interest in an eccentric old man who lives alone in a house surrounded by an overgrown garden.
11 February 1983
Three high-school students tangle with indulgent yakuza and lackadaisical police as they set out in search of the class bully, who has been kidnapped.
09 June 1990
A pampered young model is killed in a traffic accident. Given the chance to return to earth, she becomes involved with the advertising executive who is trying to cover up her death.
18 October 1975
This comedic piece centers on a trio of sisters—Rei Okamoto, Nahomi Oka, and Tamaki Katsura—whose personalities are nothing if not intense.
23 August 1975
Investigative reporter Hayakawa Junko visits a town that was once the scene of a scandal involving mass prostitution to cover the activities of high school girls at motels.
25 April 1985
Based on the novel by Tetsuro Miura, this 60-minute PV (Promotional Video) stars Aya Katsuragi.
