Japan

Joint Cannes Best Actress winners Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shine in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s most unexpected journey: a life-affirming ode to friendship at the edge of mortality.

Set against Tokyo’s quiet winter glow, a reserved proofreader finds an unexpected bond with a physics teacher in a delicate drama exploring isolation, desire, and the risks of emotional connection.

In the cold and conformist world of Japanese retail, convenience store clerk Sakai slowly awakens to the horrors of the system just as his orderly world of cheap consumerism begins to unravel with brutal consequences.

Shohei Imamura's appetite for the ugly, the brutal, the painful, is matched this time by a fully justifying subject — the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath.

Using non-professional child actors, Japanese director Akio Fujimoto offers an unflinching portrayal of the Rohingya crisis and the struggles of refugees without a nation to call their own.

Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s exquisitely crafted samurai murder mystery finds a Lord and his captured prisoner work together to solve a series of shadowy murders inside the palace compound as civil war rages around them. An elegant and probing portrait of power, violence and honour, which world premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Kore-eda's nuanced exploration of how grief manifests is distinctly Japanese yet universally resonant, in this empathetic consideration of how technology may serve as a vehicle for healing.

School bullying and adolescent identity crises are in the spotlight in Kohei Kadowaki’s extraordinary anime feature, We Are Aliens, direct from this year’s Cannes Director’s Fortnight.