IFFR 2010

Sai Yoichi

Sai’s breakthrough film builds a tragi-comic fresco of Asian-immigrant experience in Tokyo: the rip-offs and pitfalls, the subtle Japanese racism, the constant threat of deportation. In the first really ‘down’n dirty’ film about Japan’s working-class immigrants, Sai explores the dark side of Japanese politesse.

Signals - Sai Yoichi

All Under the Moon

In this epic fresco, Sai explores social history through one man, a Korean emigrant to 1920s Japan (played by Kitano Takeshi), who works his way up to head a small criminal empire. Sai’s brilliant recreation of a vanished community raises difficult questions about Korean-Japanese identity.

Blood and Bones

Made for the portmanteau feature ABC: The Short Films, Sai Yoichi’s film is a brilliant vignette of the stresses, strains and generational conflicts in present-day family life. Screened before Doing Time.

Contemporary Dining Table

With a restrained, Ozu-like flavour, Sai adapted Hanawa Kazuichi’s autobiographical manga about three years imprisonment after collecting replica guns and taking part in a simulated battle. Sai concentrates, in manga-style chapters, on the prison’s daily routines, heightening the original’s humour.

Doing Time

Oshima Nagisa

Korean director Sai plays the leader of a Japanese samurai militia in a film by Oshima Nagisa (whose assistant director Sai was on In the Realm of the Senses), with Kitano Takeshi as his second-in-command. Oshima explores the perils of desire, as a beautiful new recruit stirs up homosexual tensions.

Gohatto

Kamui has escaped rural poverty and family ties by becoming a ninja, but now wants a kind of freedom not available in feudal Japan, the freedom to live his own life. Great ninja film.

Kamui

With a gorgeous visual style and a laconic tone, male lead Fuji Tatsuya (star of In the Realm of the Senses), returns to his seaside roots to confront a yakuza boss. Along the way, he charms young men, softens a hard woman and busts a few heads.

Let Him Rest In Peace

The young Mizusawa survived his family’s group suicide only to be sexually abused in a mental hospital. In a separate storyline, Tokyo faces a series of identical but apparently unrelated murders, while the police investigation is riven by factional disputes.

MARKS

In Sai’s first film, ex-rocker Uchida Yuya plays an unstable and alcoholic Tokyo cop, despised by his ex-wife and daughter. As his life moves in circles, his inner rage builds up, occasionally exploding in violence against women and strangers.

Mosquito on the Tenth Floor

Sexy, funny and sad in equal measure, Sai’s second Okinawan film shows a virginal boy travelling with three hookers to a small island to collect his estranged father’s washed up and sun-bleached bones.

The Pig's Retribution

A huge hit in Japan and winner of several ‘Best Director’ prizes, this moving biopic about a guide dog for the blind avoids all false sentiment. Adults and children alike will enjoy the story about a Labrador and his embittered, querulous new owner.

Quill

Sai’s only contribution to Japan’s soft sex ‘roman porno’ genre, training ground for a generation of young directors, shows a short-lived but happy ménage à trios. Much better than most ‘roman porno’, Sai shows a trio retreating from the world to live out an erotic dream.

Sex Crime

Sai’s first Korean movie is a hard-boiled revenge thriller, full of visual flair, about a loner known as ‘Soo’, who is wanted both by cops and gangs, while he's looking for his identical twin brother, from whom he was separated as a small boy.

During the Vietnam War era, the influx of American soldiers to Okinawa boosted the local economy and introduced many bars and nightclubs. With exhausting displays of energy, Sai presents a whirlwind romance between a local rocker and the daughter of a mixed American-Okinawan marriage.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025