The Erotic Empire

KEN SAN pieces together the puzzle of the life and legacy of Japan's mythical acting icon, Ken Takakura. Collaborators, friends and family tell intimate stories of Ken's journey: how one man of quiet dignity became a cultural barrier-breaking film star.

A documentary on Teruo Ishii, the Japanese "King of Cult".

After the war, many filmmakers were expelled from the Japanese film industry due to the Toho Dispute and the Red Purge. Amid such circumstances, there were people who set up their own independent production companies and embarked on film production without relying on corporations. This documentary film focuses on the passionate "spirit of film" of directors such as Satsuo Yamamoto and Tadashi Imai, who, despite many hardships, produced a succession of masterpieces overflowing with humanism and rebellious spirit.

An intimate chronicle of the shooting of Ran (1985), a film directed by the legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.

Film director and screenwriter Seijun Suzuki (1923-2017), who in the sixties was the great innovator of Japanese cinema; and his collaborator, art director and screenwriter Takeo Kimura (1918-2010), recall how they made their great masterpieces about the Yakuza underworld for the Nikkatsu film company.

Because his style was similar to that of Yasujiro Ozu, who was already active at Shochiku, he moved to PCL (currently Toho) in 1933, where he appeared in the talkie works "My Wife, Like a Rose" and "Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro." It got attention. There were times when he was unable to make as many films as he wanted due to wartime film regulations and post-war Toho disputes, but in 1951 he revived his career with Meshi. Since then, he has released masterpieces one after another, including "Okaasan," "Lightning," "The Couple," "Wife," "Anii Mouto," "Sounds of the Mountain," and "Bangiku." The pinnacle of his work, "Floating Clouds," is Kenji Mizoguchi's "Wife." Even director Ozu was impressed, calling it a masterpiece of Japanese cinema, on par with "The Sisters of Gion." He depicted ordinary people in everyday life with an everyday realism that was not influenced by lyricism, and he consistently sought out women as his subjects.

A dangerous mobster threatens the life of a businessman's mother in this thriller. As Ryuji oversees the building of a bridge in Japan, a powerful gangster plans to stop the project. By any means necessary.

The obstetrics and gynecology department where Juri Takahashi is about to give birth is a horrifyingly abnormal hospital. When young women come to the doctor's office, they are always put to sleep under anesthesia. The director and his assistants perform all kinds of acts on them, and they record the scenes with a video camera and collect them.

The film is a series of vignettes from Taiji Tonoyama's life and film clips, interspersed with a dialogue to camera by Nobuko Otowa, addressing the camera as if she is addressing Tonoyama himself, recollecting events in his life. The film focuses on Tonoyama's alcohol dependence and his various sexual relationships, as well as his film work with Shindo.

Okuyama is a stocker at the supermarket who has no luck with women. His life is thrown upside down when his sister Noriko unexpectedly moves into his small apartment. Okuyama is overcome with lustful thoughts for her, but she regards him simply as a brother.

Two good friends entering different women's colleges, joining the wrestling club, and fighting as rivals.

Believing their childish lust to be love, a young couple eloped and moved to Tokyo, but the frustration of hunger and poverty turns them into cornered mice. However, the decisive breakup came from an unexpected incident. One day, a young wife is imprisoned by a paranoid middle-aged man.

Three people whose lives have taken a turn for the worse retreat into a world of erotic dreams made flesh in this drama from director Sai Yoichi. An executive with a large industrial corporation finds his job and his future is on the line when his firm is beset by labor troubles at the same time severe financial mismanagement has been discovered. As the executive looks for a way out of his situation, he becomes involved in a ménage à trois relationship with two fellow employees, a woman and another man. As real life becomes all the more unpleasant, the businessman and his lovers become deeply attached to one another as he explores sides of his sexual nature he's never been able to investigate in the past.

It's the evening before the day all brothels must be shut-down, according to the new law, in 1958. At the Kofukuya's (literally, the house that sells happiness), five prostitutes decide to celebrate the day. Eroticism, drama, and comedy mix as each hour a different event passes, in which all the women's stories come to the surface.

Legendary anime director Rintaro’s (Metropolis, X/1999, Galaxy Express 999) first new work in over a decade depicts pioneering 1930s director Sadao Yamanaka and the production of his Nezumikozo Jirokichi. Despite dying before the age of 30, Yamanaka was a pivotal influence in Japanese cinema whose work would go on to inspire future generations. While most of his films have been lost to time, his scripts remain, and Nezumikozo Jirokichi recreates one of these lost films—a tale of a famous, virtuous bandit in old Edo—as imagined by Rintaro together with an all-star team including Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira, Memories), Taro Maki (Pluto, Millennium Actress) and Masao Maruyama (Ninja Scroll, Perfect Blue).

The story depicts how an intelligent, beautiful, and chaste female teacher becomes a woman who writhes in lust after being humiliated by the lecherous vice principal and students.

In a warehouse area at night, a drunk chief engineer is stabbed to death by someone who whistles. After the break of dawn, two seamen join the crew of a rusty cargo ship Kaiyo Maru. One is a troublemaker with bad attitudes, Senkichi Nomura, who pursues an enemy in order to take revenge for his father's death. The other is Keizo Sasaki, a buff, eagle-eyed man on board for a certain mission.

A beautiful day Rokurou, a student, was to masturbate when a beautiful girl knocks on his door: You need a girl? And so begins the story. Rokurou did not know what it was that this beautiful girl was from a millionaire family.

Newly out of prison after killing his boss' rival, Akio Maki is eager to move on and start a new life with the boss' daughter. However, the chains of the past are not so easily broken and Maki is soon ordered to kill again.

The lovely Term Azuma introduces several scenes from selected Roman Porno titles and has a scene of her own. Naomi Tani, Junko Mabuki and Izumi Shima show you why they are the NIkkatsu queens of SM.