The best Ena Koshino’s movies

Japan around 1860: popular courtesan Asagiri will be freed soon from her service, yet she cannot imagine any other existence. Until one day at a local festival, Asagiri meets the young artisan Hanjiro by chance – an encounter that changes her destiny. With a strong performance by leading actress Yumi ADACHI and exquisite camerawork and production design, A COURTESAN WITH FLOWERED SKIN succeeds in recalling the golden age of Japanese erotic film.

Story follows high school student Saki Miyanaga and her classmates as they become absorbed in the game of mahjong. They target an upcoming national competition.

Aki is an unsuccessful 29-year-old actress who eventually became a magician's assistant. While pretending to be hypnotised on the stage, Aki finds the boundary between reality and illusion becoming increasingly vague. For Aki, the only beautiful memory she has was the time spent with her lover Kaito.

Based on the award-winning novel of the same name, this boldly erotic yet movingly tender portrait of a group of vulnerable, variously wounded people — a depressed housewife, her high-school-aged lover, and his best friend, who is struggling to provide for himself and his senile grandmother — whose intersecting lives yield both sorrow and a fragile, yet enduring, hope for a brighter future. (TIFF)

Based on the novel "Kanojo no Jinsei wa Machigai ja Nai" (literal translation: Her life is not at fault) by Director Hiroki, it is a powerful story of survivors, who are all trying to find their own silver linings in life.

After failing her university entrance exam, Sakuko is invited by her aunt Mikie to spend summer vacation in a beautiful seaside town. Sakuko gets to know the people of the town, including Takashi, a shy relative of her childhood friend.

A widower and his daughter deal with the death of the man's wife.

Confident that he’s the next great Japanese thespian, Matsumoto Fighter and his manager roam the streets of Shibuya to promote him. When he finds out that up-andcoming indie director Matsunaga Daishi is holding auditions for his latest film, Matsumoto pulls out all the stops to get in. Director Ninomiya Ken began this project as a Borat-esque mockumentary about the desperate measures aspiring actors take to break into show business. But when Fighter and his manager push the limits of their unsuspecting prey a little too far, fiction and reality begin to overlap in disturbing and surprisingly violent ways. Will Fighter finally get his big break, or will his dreams come crumbling down?

Whimsical film in which students and teachers come together during a weekend for a wedding. The film flutters back and forth between the various characters and their feelings until the wedding starts. Shot in the old beach hotel where the great Ozu wrote his screenplays. © iffr.com

Kyoko (Sakura Ando) works as an insurance agent. Due to a series of unfortunate events, she brings shame to her family and has to leave her hometown. Shuichi (Tasuku Emoto) killed his drunken father to save his mother. After he is released from prison, he begins to work at a small factory in Tokyo.

High school student Izumi Kawashima, whose daily routine is rating newspaper articles, finds a wallet containing a large sum of cash. Instead of returning the wallet to its owner, Izumi decides to lend a substantial portion of the money to a middle-aged male acquaintance. She eventually returns the wallet to its owner, a wealthy high-school boy named Koki, who notices the missing money, and as compensation, asks Izumi to do something for his friend - to create a newspaper that brings happiness to its reader.

There are Tomoki, Shun, Kazuya, and Aita in Oiso, the seaside town. One day, Tomoki finds their teacher, Ito, who is their teacher and Kajya’s uncle, dead.