IFFR 2008

Kobayashi Masahiro

Again, Kobayashi takes us along to a snow-covered Hokkaido, where this time a man kidnaps the hairdresser of a small town. Not a thriller, but a lightly erotic drama about loneliness.

Film Maker in Focus: Kobayashi Masahiro

Amazing Story

A Kobayashi in top form. Yuko is a young woman who worked as a volunteer for an aid organisation in Iraq. One fateful day she was kidnapped. It's your own fault, is the universal Japanese reaction. When she came home, she still got blamed. Her fate is painfully portrayed by the Film Maker in Focus.

Bashing

Road movie filled with film references set in a snow-covered Japan. With an unlikely friendship between a cop and a Yakuza, a body in the trunk and two chance, unlucky witnesses.

Bootleg Film

‘The most French of all Japanese film makers’ made his debut with this story about the seamy side of Tokyo. A down and out writer fills his nights with drink, women and endless conversations, until he meets someone who really gets through to him.

Closing Time

When a young girl from Hokkaido is murdered in her hotel room in Tokyo with a chainsaw, Inspector Murata (the flic from the title) is brought back from his self-imposed isolation. Together with his partner, he leaves for a deserted Hokkaido to investigate.

Flic

A simple story about grand things. The old man who walks through the snow is on his way to a fish farm to look at fish and to fill the void. It will soon be two years since his wife died.

Man Walking on Snow

Cold behaviour in a cold world doesn't mean that a film about coldness should also be cold. Two people come to terms with a sorrow so great that only a flight into numbness seems to help. The man is the father whose daughter was murdered. The woman is the mother of the murderer.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025