Indie Japan

Acclaimed Japanese director Sabu (Happiness, Miss Zombie) with this frenetic, kinetic action comedy set on the bustling streets of Tokyo, the story of three losers brought together by fate.

Amid a war between Taiwanese Triads and Japanese Yakuza, a mixed-race cop hunts a psychotic criminal who traffics in children's organs.

Japanese cinema's enfant terrible, Sion Sono, unleashes this demented, whirlwind tale of cults, love, violence and perversion.

Toshio Matsumoto's kaleidoscopic masterpiece is one of the most intoxicating films of the 60s.

Seijun Suzuki's enigmatic, sumptuously designed dream of 1920s Japan might, just might be a ghost story... Voted the best Japanese film of the '80s by Japanese critics.

A hitman is hired to track down a kidnapped girl in this hallucinatory mix of erotica and yakuza violence.

In his brutal directorial debut, ‘Beat' Takeshi Kitano plays a renegade cop who frequently resorts to violence and unethical methods to get results.

Takeshi Kitano's masterful and meditative gangster film, about a yakuza sent to the beautiful beaches of Okinawa where he has time to ruminate on his fate.

A young baseball player becomes mixed up with a psychotic yakuza, in Takeshi Kitano's hilarious and twisted crime tale.

An atypically lyrical offering from Takeshi Kitano, charting the course of a relationship between a boy and his girlfriend – both profoundly deaf – when the former decides to teach himself to surf.

In one of Takeshi Kitano's most acclaimed films, he plays a detective who turns to crime while caring for his terminally ill wife.

From the acclaimed director Takeshi Kitano (Sonatine, Hana-Bi) comes a change of pace - a bizarre, over the top and absurd comedy full of slapstick silliness and never ending gags.

Sawako tries to save her father's ailing clam-packing business, but it's an uphill struggle, in Yuya Ishii's joyous, nuanced, comic drama.

An eccentric, pregnant young lady returns to her hometown to help her downtrodden old neighbours, in Yûya Ishii 's strange, whimsical comedy.

A redneck lumberjack is recruited to work on a rookie producer's inane zombie movie, in this hilarious movie-making satire.

Bizarre and unsettling sex fantasy from Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo), about a woman blackmailed by a stranger into enacting his wildest fantasies.

Shinya Tsukamoto's wild cyberpunk tale of a businessman's agonising transformation into a walking scrap heap is a jaggedly dehumanised vision of the future.

Shinya Tsukamoto's sequel has the Iron Man transforming into a cyberkinetic gun when a gang of vicious skinheads kidnap his son.

Koreeda’s first fiction feature is an exquisite meditation on loss, loneliness, uncertainty, and coming to terms with the past.

Stylish, symbolic and erotically charged Japanese horror in which the fortunes of a murderous mother-and-daughter team are upended by a strangely masked samurai.

Hiroshi Teshigahara's mystifying, serene and provocative fable about an entomologist who becomes trapped in a young widow’s desert shack.

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's collagic-vampiric love story is a highly stylish homage to Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses.

A young couple have a life-changing picnic in the forest, in this short film from Nobuhiko Obayashi (House/Hausu)

The debut film of Nobuhiko Obayashi (House/Hausu) is a wistful experimental short in which his formal dexterity is already evident.