Movies: Kyôko Ôbayashi

Hoping to find a sense of connection to her late mother, Gorgeous takes a trip to the countryside to visit her aunt at their ancestral house. She invites her six friends, Prof, Melody, Mac, Fantasy, Kung Fu, and Sweet, to join her. The girls soon dis...

Yoshiyama Kazuko is a third-year junior high school student. One day while cleaning the lab, she smells lavender and faints. From then on, she has the power to travel through time....

The only movie theater on the Onomichi seafront is about to close its doors. Its last night of screenings will be an all-night marathon of Japanese war films. When lightning strikes the theater, three young men in the audience find themselves thrown ...

After a series of chance meetings a shiftless motorbike enthusiast Ko begins a romance with a carefree girl Miyo, after teaching her to ride. When Miyo proves herself a biker prodigy Ko begins to fear that she is destined to crash. Shéa Le Poidevin a...

9th-graders Kazuo and Kazumi take a tumble at a temple in a small seacoast town in Japan. Through supernatural intervention, their minds and bodies are switched, and the result is a touching and hilarious coming-of-age comedy as they attempt to survi...

Spring, 1941. Sixteen-year-old Toshihiko attends school in the coastal town of Karatsu, where his aunt cares for his ailing cousin. Immersed in the seaside's nature and culture, Toshihiko soon befriends the town's other extraordinary adolescents as t...

It is 1965. High-school student Takeyoshi Fujiwara hears "Pipeline" by the Ventures, and is mesmerized by their unique sound. With three friends, he forms a band called "The Rocking Horsemen." A warm and comic glimpse into high-school and small-town ...

The film follows the life of Sada Abe, who became a celebrity in 1936 after strangling her lover and slicing off his penis....

Veteran filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi rounds out the second of his two trilogies about his hometown of Onomichi with this film about the budding relationship between a young lad and an eccentric old man. Fifth-grader Yuta (Takuro Atsugi) is a typical c...

The Kitao family is coping with the loss of the eldest daughter, Chizuko, who was killed in a freak accident the year prior. When the other daughter Mika is suddenly in a dangerous situation, Chizuko returns as a ghost to save her; reunited with her ...

After noticing in the news there was a fire in an old canal town, Eguchi recalls visiting there a decade ago as a university student....

During the fervently nationalist months leading up to World War II, a rebellious teenager is transferred to a new primary school in a small Inland Sea town. He vies with the school’s reigning bully, who takes a romantic interest in his older stepsist...

Relatives gather from afar in wintery Ashibetsu upon the death of patriarch Mitsuo. A mysterious woman named Nobuko suddenly shows up. Her appearance gradually exposes wartime secrets and Mitsuo's unknown past....

Toshiko does not have long to live. She wants to make the most of her time while she can and takes a sojourn to where her true hometown for which she has so much nostalgia and admiration. With her husband on her side she remains can-do and keeps her ...

An entire Japanese international grade school—and all within—are mysteriously transported to a foreboding desert wasteland. As the story unfolds, the diminishing student body weathers this apocalyptic crisis while searching for clues about their surr...

Ayase Shinsuke, a popular writer of a series of girl novels, visits Otaru, the town he grew up in. He meets a strange boy who calls himself by the author's real name....

This 150-minute documentary, directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi on the set of Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, features behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with cast and crew....

In the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, a journalist arrives in Nagaoka, a city decimated during a WWII air raid and by the 2004 Chūetsu earthquakes, to report on the disaster; there, she learns about the experiences of its inhabi...

After his parent's divorce, Kazuo Saito moves with his mother from Onomichi and must leave his girlfriend behind. At his new school, Kazuo is surprised to reunite with his childhood friend Kazumi....

Four people are discovered brutally murdered in an up-scale high-rise apartment. All the victims appear to be family, but as the investigation deepens it is discovered that one of the victims isn't related to the family....