Tokyo schoolgirl Hiromi and her friends engage in a practice known as enjo kosai, or "compensated dating", where older men pay young girls for dates. Hiromi plunges deeper into this world to raise money for an expensive ring.
The Aso family live in the old town of Nara. One Day, Kei, one of the Aso's twin boys suddenly disappears. Five years later seventeen-year old Shun, the remaining twin, is an art student. He now has to move forward with his life, together with his childhood friend, Yu.
A sexy mystery movie where a dominatrix and a detective get to the bottom of a string of suicides.
Kawase tries to come to terms with her late father, whom she never knew when growing up, and contemplates getting a tattoo like his.
A diary film about Kawase's relationship with her grandma and her search for her father, whom she has not seen since her parents divorced during her early childhood.
Naomi Kawase's documentary about Nishii Kazuo, a photo critic. He is the last chief editor for the Camera Mainichi magazine, rushing through his time with Araki Nobuyoshi and Moriyama Daido as provocative artists in the photograph world.
Kawase pays tribute to the grandmother that raised her after being separated from her parents as a child. The film teems with memories, but it is the faded, dusty photographs capturing the kindness in her grandmother’s shy smile that truly bring the woman to life.
The sequel to Naomi Kawase's Katatsumori. The film revisits Kawase’s relationship with her "grandma", capturing their love and attachment towards each other.
As a tunnel construction project threatens the natural order of one of Japan's last untouched regions, an old man and his granddaughter Haruna's humble lifestyle begins to influence the outlook of a man from Tokyo.
Tarachime is a documentary film which observes 'life' through childbirth. Kawase Naomi, a film director working under the theme of family, life and death, presents the bond of life through her own childbirth experience. "First, I was planning to film from the day I conceived a child and to the moment I gave birth. But I realized, while filming, that this is not the story of "one life." In the end, the film sublimed to a higher stage on which we can witness the knot tying one life with another."
Naomi Kawase observes people in the city of Shibuya with curiosity and openness, drawing parallels between life and filmmaking and discovering her abilities as a filmmaker.
A young bioarchaeologist Yukisuke is attracted to a girl Koyomi, who runs a small stand of taiyaki pastry that he often buys. Koyomi is hospitalized, however, by a car accident on a rainy day after they go out together, and wakes up with short term memory loss, where she cannot remember anything beyond the present day. Yukisuke tries to live close to her as before but the lack of collective memory starts to stagger him.
The last piece of Naomi Kawase's Grandmother Trilogy, following Katatsumori (1994) and See Heaven (1995), filming her grandma and herself. Her gazes and insights are cast on the lovable beings in front of her eyes.
Filmmaker Naomi Kawase captures the love, loss, and loneliness felt as she prepares to move out of her foster mother's home.
Using rare footage and exclusive interviews with filmmakers from all over the globe, "Reel Herstory" corrects the historic notion that women behind the scenes in motion pictures held peripheral careers compared with their male counterparts.
Naomi Kawase goes to the south of Japan in search of her family origins on Amami Island, with her four-year-old son Mitsuki. They meet parents, chat with the island’s inhabitants, eat traditional goat soup, observe a total solar eclipse. By reconnecting the threads of her family history, Naomi Kawase gradually fills the void left by her parents' abandonment.
It tells how 14 characters travel in a mysterious vehicle that they cannot easily get out of. Along the way, they fabricate about their identity and travel through unreal landscapes on a journey between life and death, sleep and wakefulness. According to the synopsis, "a tragicomedy with no certainties".
When a girl raised by wolves is found in the woods, she must learn to forge her own path as those around her try to exploit her for their own purposes.
A photographer and a filmmaker challenge each other to shoot—one to photograph the other to film—two young actresses, one from Tokyo, the other from the countryside. The photographer seeks naturalism in his compositions, and Kawase observes and comments on his work. The competition between the photographer, the filmmaker, and the actresses creates a charged atmosphere.
The love and conflicts between mother and daughter, and between husband and wife. The final chapter of Nakagawa Ryutaro's trilogy, depicting the forms of love that endure through loss and rebirth.
