Film Programming & Booking

Co-organized with Japan Society Performing Arts.

Featuring benshi Ichiro Kataoka and shamisen player Sumie Kaneko.

An independent talent who miraculously emerged in the 1980s, Kaizo Hayashi's cinema of the past brims with ingenuity and far-flung imagination, conjuring fantasies of what dreams may come.

Part of JAPAN CUTS 2024; soft-titled 35mm import.

Part of JAPAN CUTS 2024

Organized by Alexander Fee and Peter Tatara

Declared a genius by Kenji Mizoguchi, Hiroshi Shimizu remains one of the forgotten masters of Japanese cinema. Distinguished by his loosely sketched plots and roaming camera, Shimizu’s worlds are suffused with an innate naturalism and a lyrical humanism that observes the journeys of children, outcasts and travelers alike.

A two-film focus on pioneering 1980s production outfit The Directors Company—featuring rare theatrical revivals of Sogo Ishii’s The Crazy Family and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Bumpkin Soup.

Taking its name from a term dating back to the early days of the moving image—Kinema Essentials features year-round screenings of beloved classics, hidden gems and recent discoveries of Japanese film; A new canon from across the breadth of Japanese cinematic history.

Taisho Roman offers transgressive visions of Japan’s own belle epoque, featuring films from some of Japan’s most radical and outré filmmakers.

Programmed by Dan Sullivan

Closing night of Lincoln Center retrospective held at Japan Society, commemorating one year since Yoshida’s passing with celluloid imports of A Story Written With Water and A Promise.

Screened at JAPAN CUTS 2023; rare import of director Elizabeth Lennard’s personal 16mm print.

Organized by Alexander Fee, Peter Tatara, and K.F. Watanabe

The first North American retrospective on the work of 80s auteur Shinji Somai, a pioneering filmmaker during what is oftentimes referred to as the “lost decade” of Japanese cinema.

Guest-curated by Will Carroll

Celebrating 100 years of iconoclast director Seijun Suzuki (1923-2017), a singular force in Japanese cinema whose radical stylistic vision and unpredictable narratives shaped the B-movie genre, Japanese cinephilia and the political New Left, Japan Society and The Japan Foundation present a selection of six films from across the filmmaker’s nearly 60-film body of work, all on imported 35mm prints straight from Japan.

A focus celebrating the defining early works of filmmaker Shunji Iwai, Love Letters offers a primer on the cineaste’s lyrical portraits of adolescence, ripe with poetic yearnings of grief, friendship and young love.

Marking 50 years since Okinawa’s reversion from American sovereignty back to Japan, Visions of Okinawa documents the dynamic historical, political and cultural spaces of Okinawa around this pivotal point in history. Note: Link is missing streaming component, which included NDU focus on Asia is One and Motoshinkakarannu.

Offering an eclectic range of classic, underseen, and contemporary visions from Japanese animation, Monthly Anime explores the widely influential legacy of anime.

Year-round screenings of beloved classics, hidden gems and recent discoveries of Japanese cinema, presented in-theater at Japan Society.

Organized by K.F. Watanabe, Alexander Fee and Joel Neville Anderson.

Framing itself on the fringes of reality where the pitfalls of man's fears reside, Shattered Visions reaches towards the outer realms of the mind, delving into the psyches of madmen and those avoiding such chasms. Fractured and disassociated, the series offers a fleeting glimpse of what might become when the the question of "Who am I?" arises. The coils of this malady are disparate and far-reaching, permeating through the works of De Palma, Cronenberg and Frankenheimer.

Influenced by the likes of John Garfield and Montgomery Clift, Alain Delon took on his own stature among the greats as a prominent French actor of the early 1960s. Spanning a decade of his career - from 1960 to 1970, this retrospective aims to demonstrate the vast breadth of Delon's abilities - from a nihilistic coldness to an impassioned fervor.

Weaving melodrama, tragedy, and comedy together, the commedia all'italiana encapsulated a distinct and defining era of Italian culture and cinema.

Deriving itself from the distortion of what is most familiar to us, body horror preys upon destabilizing the very structure of the human body. The human figure and form are manipulated and molded, allowing for even human nature to be twisted and changed into something entirely unknown.

Programmed by Francesca Lambert

In 2017, The Toronto International Film Festival and its partners celebrated the country's sesquicentennial by screening a roster of 150 "essential moving-image productions" from Canadian film history. This series draws from that list but focuses more narrowly on works dating back to the 1990s, the decade in which Canadian film first made major inroads at international festivals and achieved financial and critical success at home and abroad.

Programmed by Alfredo Fee

Courting both critical acclaim and controversy, the films of Austrian auteur Michael Haneke are characterized by an unforgiving and despairing assessment of human nature. The filmography of the two-time Palme D'Or winner (both The White Ribbon and Amour are proudly included in this retrospective) deconstructs bourgeoisie ideals and follows a tradition of social estrangement that masters such as Antonioni and Bergman depicted before him.

Programmed by Antonia Glaser

Few directors have inspired as deafening a chorus of both acclaim and criticism as Elia Kazan. Despite a career polarized by his controversial testimony before HUAC in 1952, it was indebted to the brazen steps of his artistry that such celebrated talents as Marlon Brando, James Dean, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, Julie Harris, Warren Beatty, and many others were thrust into the awe-inspiring spotlight of American cinema.

Programmed by Serin Lee

"...It's no good meeting the right person too soon or too late. If I'd lived in another time or place...my story might have had a very different ending." So goes the closing monologue of Wong Kar-wai's 2046. Wong is far from the only director whose imagination this idea has captured, however, and many iterations of it have illuminated the big screen.

Programmed by Alex Kong

The turn of the millennium brought with it an explosively creative renaissance of the cinema of South Korea. Spearheaded by a vanguard of auteurs, this reinvention of a long-moribund film industry was met with wild acclaim on the festival circuit.

Programmed by Jola Idowu

I imagine a future in which black pain is not exploited for art...But is told, cared for, and felt...Like the ending to Forrest Gump or Sally Fields in Steel Magnolias...Where it is not only Denzel with one tear in his eye...But mothers, holding daughters, holding fathers, holding sisters, holding daughters, holding sons.

Programmed by Will Carroll

In February 2017, the great Japanese filmmaker Suzuki Seijun (born Suzuki Seitaro) passed away at the age of 93. In a career spanning fifty years, Suzuki directed more than sixty theatrical and television films, working in genres ranging from thrillers to romances to horror to gangster movies, and in industrial contexts ranging from B-genre movies in the Japanese studio system to the international art-house circuit.

Programmed by Alfredo Fee

Poland's cinema has enraptured its viewers with some of the most compelling, subversive, and, above all, humanist documentations of filmmaking's power. This series highlights the expansive scope and audacity of Polish filmmakers who strove to redefine the breadth of cinema as well as struggle to assert an identity that was uniquely formed by the political and social pressures and conditions of a post-war Poland.

Programmed by Alex Kong

The pervasiveness of the coming-of-age story, recurring across cultures and artistic mediums, makes it worth asking why such an apparently simple and well-trodden narrative framework continues to exercise such a powerful hold over our collective imagination.