Aoki and Mori

In a near-future Japanese city bracing for a devastating earthquake, a group of teenage friends navigate personal struggles and fractured bonds amid rising tension.

The daily grind of the elderly cleaner of a Japanese bathhouse is disrupted when a young man attempts suicide.

In the city with the highest suicide rate and where people don’t look to each other’s eyes, a gaze between two strangers could change the course of the day.

The fascinating city of Tokyo is the mesmerizing setting where three people live. A man has been fired from his job, but shame is too heavy a burden for him. He repeats the same ceremony every morning. He gets up, gets dressed and walks out to his non-existent job. He wanders around carrying his lie with him. Eiko works at a twenty-four hour convenience store. Hours and days go by with no emotions beyond the opening and closing of the teller. A man appears into her life. They will start a relationship that will fill in part the emptiness in their lives. A rock band is falling apart. After the last rehearsal, the guitar player announces his decision to quit to his friend, the singer and front man of the band, but he is not willing to accept it. Three everyday stories – three lives are told.

On an unseasonably hot day in November, Hiro, a Japanese immigrant in New York City, decides to butcher a live chicken for dinner. While showing his visiting cousin Kei around, the pair encounter a medical emergency on the street. After they mishandle the situation and end up causing more harm than good, Hiro cannot bring himself to kill the chicken. Throughout, Kei observes his cousin’s new lifestyle as Hiro and his pregnant wife prepare for their move to Chinatown. As the day wears on, Hiro and Kei’s actions highlight how their lives are complicit in the structural violence that surrounds them.

Shimada, a former Self-Defense Force member, suffers from severe PTSD following the loss of a comrade in a firefight in war-torn South Sudan, a tragedy covered up by the government. Shining a light into Shimada's solitary life in illegal arms manufacturing is a job as an apprentice at a traditional Japanese fireworks factory. There he begins crafting fireworks alongside the master artisan and fellow craftsmen who embrace fireworks that illuminate people's peaceful lives. Yet, parallel to Shimada's journey, his comrades-in-arms with unresolved feelings team up on radical acts to expose the government's cover-up, escalating tensions and pulling Shimada back into the darkness he thought he'd left behind.

A half-brother and sister meet for the first time in 30 years at their father’s funeral. Having grown up separately, will the long-standing gap between them still be unbridgeable? As they pass each other and return to their respective lives, they feel a sense of parental love at the moment of parting.

In Tokyo, an unfulfilled romantic encounter and sudden disappearance leave Seiji struggling to make sense of what never happened and what might have been.

Near-future Tokyo. Kou, through the help of his high school best friend, finds a surprising way to express his mounting frustration at the insidious forces of commercialism that are forcing out the neighbors he cares most about. Initially inspired by a prank that the writer-director Neo Sora (The Chicken, 2020) had pulled on him in his childhood, a sense of warm nostalgia and cold, material reality intermingle to tell a tale set in the not-so-distant future about disappearing spaces and the forces of policing and gentrification that drills this process forward.

Seven tales of transformation poetically reimagine Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and paint a picture of violence and catharsis, anchored in mythical landscapes.

Didi, a French traveler, visits a rural town and explores the mountains by bicycle. At a remote shrine, she meets a suspicious young man named Chance, dressed as a farmer, but her bicycle gets a flat tire and she ends up spending the night in an old house. She then meets Emi, a woman who works at a bakery in town, and they hit it off, and the two of them ride through the mountains together. Before long, the end of summer arrives.