Our friends at Film at Lincoln Center is generously extending free tickets to Scarlet by Mamoru Hosoda (Summer Wars, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and Digimon: The Movie) to followers of JapanCulture•NYC. The screening, part of this year’s New York Film Festival, will take place Wednesday, October 8, 2025 at 9:00 p.m., so act quickly! The screening will feature a Q&A with Hosoda. To redeem your free tickets, please visit this special promo link from Film at Lincoln Center. PLEASE NOTE: If the ticket reservation page indicates a price, click the PROMO button on the top-right portion of the screen (to the left of the shopping cart icon) and enter Promo Code 2840.

Refunds cannot be issued on previously purchased tickets. All tickets are subject to availability. Please arrive 15 minutes before the screening.

Still from *Scarlet*, a Sony Pictures Classic Release

About Scarlet

Mamoru Hosoda | 2025 | 111 minutes | Japanese with English subtitles

In his towering new achievement, animator-director Mamoru Hosoda transports viewers to jaw-dropping fantasy worlds, combining weighty Shakespearean themes with wondrous anime imagery as he conjures a phantasmal riff on Hamlet.

After attempting to avenge the brutal death of her father at the hands of her power-hungry uncle Claudius in 16th-century Elsinore, the princess Scarlet awakes in the Land of the Dead. In this forbidding purgatory of mountains and desert, governed by a powerful godlike dragon, Scarlet must fight for her own soul and body while still vowing to defeat Claudius. Yet her plans are complicated by the presence of the handsome Hijiri, a saintly hospital nurse from our contemporary world who refuses to accept that he’s dead—or that revenge can end history’s cycles of violence.

Hosoda has made an epic fantasy that weighs the human impulse for revenge against the need for care, forgiveness, and survival.

Support JapanCulture•NYC by becoming a member! For $5 a month, you’ll help maintain the high quality of our site while we continue to showcase and promote the activities of our vibrant community. Please click here to begin your membership today!

Susan McCormac 7/19/25 Susan McCormac 7/19/25

Remaining Japanese Films at NYAFF

24th New York Asian Film Festival

Walter Reade Theater – 165 W. 65th Street
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater – 144 W. 65th Street
LOOK Cinemas – 657 W. 57th Street
SVA Theatre – 333 W. 23rd Street

The New York Asian Film Foundation and Film at Lincoln Center present the 24th edition of the New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF). This year marks NYAFF’s most globally expansive lineup . From blockbusters to indie treasures, NYAFF offers a rare opportunity to discover emerging talent and groundbreaking voices from across the region.

This year’s theme is “Cinema as Disruption”—spotlighting bold, genre-defying films that challenge, provoke, and reimagine. From unsettling horror and feminist thrillers to cosmic punk epics and political allegories, NYAFF celebrates the power of Asian cinema to defy convention.

“This year’s lineup dares to confront, question, and dream—exactly what cinema should do,” says Samuel Jamier, NYAFF Executive Director. To see the full lineup and to purchase tickets, please visit NYAFF’s website.

The remaining Japanese films include Transcending Dimensions, Blue Spring, 9 Souls, How Dare You?, Ravens, Samurai Fury, Jinsei, and Babanba Banban Vampire. Several screenings

Saturday, July 19 at 9:15 p.m.

Walter Reade Theater – 165 W. 65th Street

Admission: $19 General | $16 Seniors, Students, and Persons with Disabilities | $14 Film at Lincoln Center Members

Transcending Dimensions

2025 | 97 minutes | Japanese with English subtitles

North American Premiere

Matsuri to Midnight + Q&A with NYAFF 2025 Filmmaker in Focus Toshiaki Toyoda

Reaffirming his status as one of Japan’s most daring cinema provocateurs, NYAFF 2025 Filmmaker in Focus Toshiaki Toyoda returns with his first feature in seven years. A pulsing flirtation with the surreal, and an enthralling masterwork exploding with visceral and cerebral delights, Transcending Dimensions fuses sci-fi and crime into a meditation on the very nature of existence, time, and belief. Blending concepts that he’s been exploring in his brilliant “Mt. Resurrection Wolf” series of shorts, Toyoda immerses viewers in an aesthetically transfixing vision of inner and outer worlds. Set against a backdrop of collapsing realities and cosmic uncertainty, his new film delivers an epic journey involving four men: an earnest hit man (frequent collaborator Ryuhei Matsuda), a gullible monk, a mountain mystic, and a powerful sorcerer. Soon, faux religions, yakuza-style violence, and environmental collapse threaten to collide.

Ticket holders are invited to the Furman Gallery for Matsuri to Midnight before the screening starts.

*Blue Spring* © Taiyo Matsumoto/Shogakukan・"Blue Spring"Film Partners 2001

Sunday, July 20 at 12:30 p.m.

Walter Reade Theater – 165 W. 65th Street

Admission: $19 General | $16 Seniors, Students, and Persons with Disabilities | $14 Film at Lincoln Center Members

Blue Spring

2002 | 83 minutes | Japanese with English subtitles

Special Screening

Q&A with NYAFF 2025 Filmmaker in Focus Toshiaki Toyoda

NYAFF presents a special 35mm screening of Toshiaki Toyoda’s seminal classic Blue Spring. This groundbreaking, provocative film captured the malaise and disillusionment of a generation of youth coming of age at the turn of the millennium in a post-bubble Japan, where the norms of the past felt irrelevant and the future uncertain. With serious verve and a roiling badass soundtrack, this tale of power and rebellion grabs the viewer and doesn’t let go.

In their graduation year, disaffected students turn their concrete box of a school into a backdrop against which to create their own version of society. The newly elected boss Kujo (Ryuhei Matsuda) disdains all the rules, including those that have led to his election. Into this power vacuum, his scandalized friend and lieutenant Aoki (Hirofumi Arai) enters with vicious intent. As graduation looms, the pupils study violence and death.

Sunday, July 20 at 3:15 p.m.

LOOK Cinemas – 657 W. 57th Street

Admission: $15

9 SOULS

2003 | 120 minutes | Japanese with English subtitles

Special Screening

Part of NYAFF’s 2025 Filmmaker in Focus on Toshiaki Toyoda, 9 SOULS is the surrealist comedy addition to Toyoda’s body of work. Following his nihilist punk youth drama Blue Spring, Toyoda showcases his genre range with a mashup of gangster drama, satire, and comedy. Though it may be different in tone, 9 SOULS nevertheless shows Toyoda’s signature rebelliousness and cult style.

Nine convicts escape from prison; most are convicted murderers. They commandeer a van from a strip club. Their plan is to find a stash of counterfeit money that a deranged cell mate told them about, divide it, then part ways. They make it to the site where the money is supposed to be hidden, and then one by one, each seeks out the place he wants to be, a version of home, somewhere to connect. Will it end well for any of them?

Sunday, July 20 at 4:30 p.m.

Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater – 144 W. 65th Street

Master Class with Tadanobu Asano and Mark Gill

Admission: $10 for general public and $5 for FLC & NYAFF members

An in-depth master class with renowned actor Tadanobu Asano (Shōgun) and the director of Ravens, Mark Gill.

Sunday, July 20 at 6:15 p.m.

Walter Reade Theater – 165 W. 65th Street

Admission: $19 General | $16 Seniors, Students, and Persons with Disabilities | $14 Film at Lincoln Center Members

How Dare You?

2025 | 96 minutes | Japanese with English subtitles

North American Premiere

Q&A with Mipo O

Grade schooler Yuishi becomes infatuated with schoolmate Kokoa when she gives an impassioned class speech about saving the environment in the spirit of Greta Thunberg. Soon after they team up with the class troublemaker, and Yuishi finds himself both on a self-righteous crusade of activism and in a precocious love triangle. When the trio’s antics escalate to unexpected consequences, they must all own up to the cold, hard truth.

Director Mipo O proves not only her insightful sense of humor, but also a knack for getting naturalistic performances out of her young cast. With its cleverly wry script that takes on both huge moral issues and murmurs of the heart from a child’s viewpoint, How Dare You? is a winningly observant and bittersweet cautionary tale for both young and old alike.

*Ravens* ©Vestapol Films, Ark Entertainment, Minded Factory, Y house, Katsize Films

Sunday, July 20 at 9:00 p.m.

Walter Reade Theater – 165 W. 65th Street

Premium Screening: $25 for general public; $20 for seniors, students, persons with disabilities, and members

Ravens

2024 | 116 minutes | Japanese and English with English subtitles

New York Premiere

Q&A with Mark Gill, Tadanobu Asano, and cinematographer Fernando Ruiz

In Mark Gill’s hauntingly beautiful portrait of legendary Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase, Golden Globe winner Tadanobu Asano (Shōgun) commands the spotlight with his trademark manic energy and melancholy grandeur, reminding us not only of his irresistible charm, but of his immense talents.

In a story spanning 50 years, ranging from Shinjuku’s iconic Golden Gai to New York’s MoMA, Asano embraces both the dark and the light and, with his luminous costar Kumi Takiuchi (A Balance), brings the tortured artist and his obsessions to exhilarating life. With the support of the Fukase Archives, Oscar- and BAFTA-nominated director Gill (The Voorman Problem, England Is Mine) creates an achingly poetic film driven by a pulsating yesteryear soundtrack, shot with exquisite period sensitivity, tinged with magical realism, and layered with Fukase’s own iconic images, evoking the fractured beauty of a life lived on the knifepoint of genius and madness.

Tuesday, July 22 at 6:00 p.m.

SVA Theatre – 333 W. 23rd Street

Admission: $15

Samurai Fury

2025 | 135 minutes | Japanese with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

Yu Irie’s thrilling jidaigeki epic vividly portrays rebellion during Japan’s tumultuous Muromachi period. Hasuda (Yo Oizumi), a rogue warrior reminiscent of Mifune, gathers a crew of fighters, including a bojutsu prodigy (Kento Nagao), to challenge the oppressive shogunate. Mixing spaghetti-western grit, wuxia flair, and dynamic swordplay, this adaptation of Ryosuke Kakine’s novel is brilliantly filmed at Toei Kyoto Studio.

Samurai Fury combines breathtaking cinematography, electrifying choreography, and gripping historical drama, depicting a pivotal era’s brutality and beauty, as well as a desperate fight for justice that alters Japan’s destiny.

Friday, July 25 at 9:00 p.m.

SVA Theatre – 333 W. 23rd Street

Admission: $15

Jinsei

2025 | 93 minutes | Japanese with English subtitles

North American Premiere

2025 NYAFF Uncaged Award Nominee

Intro and Q&A with director Ryuya Suzuki

Jinsei follows the life of one man over 100 years. The main character’s life is broken up into chapters, distinguished by the evolution of his name, or rather the names he goes by. He is a child, an orphan, a budding J-pop star, an outcast, a leader, an oracle. Employing a lo-fi style, director Ryuya Suzuki immerses the viewer in this man’s life, and as each chapter evolves so does the picture’s framing, color palette, and editing style.

Epic in scope, Jinsei is one of the most original Japanese animated films in years. Over nearly two years, newcomer Suzuki wrote, directed, animated, and edited this tour-de-force by himself, determined to bring his captivating vision to life. Essential, experiential viewing, this is one that must be seen on the big screen.

Sunday, July 27 at 6:00 p.m.

SVA Theatre – 333 W. 23rd Street

Admission: $15

Babanba Banban Vampire

2025 | 105 minutes | Japanese with English subtitles

Love bites, and so does he—but only when the neck is ripest. In this adaptation of Hiromasa Okujima's cult manga, 450-year-old vampire Ranmaru (Ryo Yoshizawa) works at a traditional bathhouse while stalking his next meal: 15-year-old heir Rihito (Rihito Itagaki), whose virgin blood he craves. When Rihito falls for a classmate, Ranmaru declares war. His desperate sabotage attempts turn the town into a battlefield of cockblocking chaos.

Director Shinji Hamasaki delivers this BL-tinged bloodbath with fang-sharp wit, featuring a 2025 remix of the classic bathhouse anthem "Ii Yu da na." One question remains: Is protecting your dinner's virginity harder than immortality itself?

Susan McCormac 3/31/25 Susan McCormac 3/31/25

Film Set in Japan’s Countryside Part of Film at Lincoln Center Series

The Height of Coconut Trees

Tuesday, April 8 at 8:30 p.m.
Walter Reade Theater – 165 W. 65th Street

Thursday, April 10 at 6:00 p.m.
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2 at MoMA – 11. W. 53rd Street

Admission: $18 General Public | $15 Students

Film at Lincoln Center presents the North American premiere of The Height of Coconut Trees, the debut film of Chinese cinematographer-turned-director Du Jie that is set in the stunning Japanese countryside. The selection is part of the 54th New Directors/New Films 2025 series presented by The Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center.

The April 8 screening at Walter Reade Theater features a Q&A with director Du Jie.

Discount for JCNYC Members

To purchase tickets to this event, please visit Film at Lincoln Center’s website. Our friends at FLC are offering JapanCultureNYC members a discount to the screenings! Members will receive a separate email with the code for $5 off the ticket price. Not member of JapanCultureNYC? Join now by going to https://www.japanculture-nyc.com/membership.

About The Height of Coconut Trees

Du Jie | 2024 | 100 minutes | Japanese with English subtitles

Chinese cinematographer-turned-director Du Jie makes a seamless transition with The Height of Coconut Trees, a debut set in Japan that is equal parts sumptuous and piercing. While Sugamoto’s relationship is coming undone, Rin mourns the suicide of his girlfriend. When calamity strikes, Sugamoto visits the countryside resort Rin has taken over to combat his grief, uniting two people for whom life has been an unbearable procession of yearning and loss.

From these plots Du turns Coconut Trees into a miniature travelogue and existential road picture—come for the beautiful locales, stay for a conversation about fate, faith, and regret worthy of Rohmer—with faint wisps of a ghost tale.

New Directors/New Films 2025

To learn more about New Directors/New Films 2025 at FLC and MoMA, please visit https://www.newdirectors.org/##films.

Susan McCormac 1/25/24 Susan McCormac 1/25/24

Kurosawa Oscar-Winner at Film at Lincoln Center

Dersu Uzala at Film at Lincoln Center

Sunday, January 28 at 6:15 p.m.
Tuesday, January 30 at 6:30 p.m.

Walter Reade Theater – 165 W. 65th Street

Admission: $17 General Public | $14 Students | $12 JapanCulture•NYC Members (with Discount Code)

In Akira Kurosawa’s storied career, the Japanese director won two Oscars and a 1990 Lifetime Achievement Award. His first Oscar came in 1951 for Rashomon, and his second was for the 1975 Soviet film Dersu Uzala.

Film at Lincoln Center is featuring the film that garnered Kurosawa his second Academy Award as part of its series Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s, a tribute to the French film critic Serge Daney and the films he championed in his book La Rampe, a collection of essays about cinema. From this lineup, Dersu Uzala captures an endangered way of being in the world, in which the encounter between a Russian military geographer and a Nanai hunter leads to an unexpected friendship. The series runs from Friday, January 26 through Sunday, February 4 with Dersu Uzala screening on both Sunday, January 28 and Tuesday, January 30. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to see the film on the big screen! To purchase tickets, please visit Film at Lincoln Center’s website.

Film at Lincoln Center is giving an exclusive opportunity for members of JapanCulture•NYC! Members will receive the discount code to use for $5 off tickets to a screening of Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala. Not a member? Please click here to register. Your membership fee of $5 a month helps defray the costs of running JapanCulture•NYC and keeps everyone informed about All Things Japanese in New York City.

Dersu Uzala

In Akira Kurosawa’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, an unexpected friendship arises between a Russian military geographer and the Nanai hunter he has hired to guide his expedition across the Siberian taiga. After the baffling fiasco of his previous film, Dodes’ka-den, and his subsequent suicide attempt, Kurosawa experienced an artistic rebirth with this Soviet-produced ode to wilderness, replacing the dynamic montage of his earlier films with stately widescreen compositions that capture the Russian Far East in all its forbidding beauty. In celebrated scenes like the expedition’s encounter with an Amur tiger (no CGI here) and the blizzard in which famed geographer Vladimir Arsenyev is saved by the titular hunter, Kurosawa pays tribute to once-indomitable nature on the verge of being encroached upon by the Trans-Siberian Railroad, capturing an endangered way of being that resonates ever more strongly in our era of climate disaster and rampant capitalism.

Susan McCormac 11/14/23 Susan McCormac 11/14/23

Film at Lincoln Center to Spotlight Japan’s Cinematic Rebel

The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida

Friday, December 1 through Friday, December 8

Walter Reade Theater – 165 W. 65th Street (unless otherwise noted)

Admission: $17 General Public | $14 Students, Seniors, individuals with disabilities | $12 Members

Film at Lincoln Center presents “The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida,” a retrospective spotlighting the films of one of Japan’s greatest cinematic rebels. Running from December 1 through 8, all 16 films will be presented on 35mm or 16mm at Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, and Japan Society.

The retrospective presents the most comprehensive collection of Yoshida’s work ever screened in the United States. Most notably, the series will feature Yoshida’s famed political trilogy, which captures significant moments in 20th century Japanese history: Eros + Massacre (1968), regarded as his masterpiece; Heroic Purgatory (1970), a kaleidoscopic, mazelike memory piece about an atomic engineer whose past as a college-age revolutionary militant erupts into the present; and Coup d’état (1973), a spellbinding portrait of notorious militarist Ikki Kita.

To purchase tickets, please visit Film at Lincoln Center’s website. Use promo code OKADA to enjoy $5 off all ticket purchases.

Lineup

Good-for-Nothing
Friday, December 1 at 2:00 p.m.
Tuesday, December 5 at 8:45 p.m.

Yoshida’s debut feature vividly depicts the ennui and intellectual and spiritual restlessness of a generation of bourgeois youth in Tokyo at the dawn of the 1960s.

Blood Is Dry
Friday, December 1 at 4:15 p.m.
Saturday, December 2 at 8:30 p.m.

Yoshida’s satirical second feature again ferociously critiques Japanese society following its postwar reinvention as a capitalist giant.

Eros + Massacre
Friday, December 1 at 7:00 p.m.
Tuesday, December 5 at 2:00 p.m.

Among the greatest of all political films and perhaps the work that best embodies the spirit of Yoshida’s artistic project, Eros + Massacre is an epic, historiographic examination of the points of intersection between the domains of desire and politics.

Affair in the Snow
Saturday, December 2 at 1:00 p.m.

A love triangle plays out in the snow in Yoshida’s eleventh feature, a striking deconstruction of the melodrama.

Heroic Purgatory
Saturday, December 2 at 3:15 p.m.

The second film in a trilogy (inaugurated by Eros + Massacre) concerning 20th century Japanese history, Heroic Purgatory is a kaleidoscopic, mazelike memory piece that is perhaps Yoshida’s most recognizably avant-garde work.

The Affair
Saturday, December 2 at 6:00 p.m.
Wednesday, December 6 at 1:00 p.m.

Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center – 144 W. 65th Street

Again using the melodrama genre as an instrument of oblique social critique, Yoshida’s ninth feature stars Mariko Okada as a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a philandering businessman who finds herself mysteriously drawn toward an old lover of her deceased mother’s.

Akitsu Springs
Sunday, December 3 at 1:00 p.m.
Thursday, December 7 at 1:00 p.m.

The first great commercial success of his young career, Akitsu Springs is a tear-jerking romance that finds Yoshida working in color and in collaboration with his frequent star and lifelong filmmaking partner Mariko Okada (in her 100th on-screen appearance).

Wuthering Heights
Sunday, December 3 at 3:30 p.m.
Thursday, December 7 at 3:30 p.m.

Emily Brontë’s Gothic romance is transposed to feudal Japan for Yoshida’s powerfully stark, elemental take on the story.

18 Who Cause a Storm
Sunday, December 3 at 6:30 p.m.
Wednesday, December 6 at 3:15 p.m.

Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center – 144 W. 65th Street

A group of migrant workers fed up with their being ruthlessly exploited by the society around them lash out in Yoshida’s rugged widescreen chronicle of proletarian unrest.

Women in the Mirror
Sunday, December 3 at 9:00 p.m.

In his final fiction feature, Yoshida returned to an old subject in his work: the unfathomable trauma known by Japan due to the United States’s dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Flame and Women
Tuesday, December 5 at 6:30 p.m.

Yoshida returned to the melodrama—this time synthesizing elements of the horror film in the process—with this chronicle of a woman’s suddenly swelling desire for her child’s biological father.

Coup d’état
Wednesday, December 6 at 6:30 p.m.

Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center – 144 W. 65th Street

The culminating film in the trilogy formed by Eros + Massacre and Heroic Purgatory, Yoshida’s 16th feature is a spellbinding portrait of notorious militarist Ikki Kita, whose 1936 attempt at staging a coup against the Japanese government would later serve as inspiration to the similarly controversial nationalist writer Yukio Mishima some years later.

A Promise
Wednesday, December 6 at 8:45 p.m. – Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
Friday, December 8 at 9:00 p.m. – Japan Society

Yoshida came out of his feature filmmaking retirement with this typically idiosyncratic meditation on what was, at the time, a taboo topic: euthanasia.

Farewell to the Summer Light
Thursday, December 7 at 6:30 p.m.

A fascinating transitional film for Yoshida, Farewell to the Summer Light finds the restless iconoclast heading to Europe to tell the tale of an on-again-off-again romance between Naoko, a married expat who specializes in import-export (Mariko Okada), and Makoto (Tadashi Yokouchi), a Japanese scholar who is searching for a cathedral that served as the architectural inspiration for a church built in Nagasaki by Portuguese missionaries.

Confessions Among Actresses
Thursday, December 7 at 8:45 p.m.

Something like Yoshida’s response to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Confessions Among Actresses finds Yoshida teaming up with three prominent Japanese actresses—Mariko Okada, Ruriko Asaoka, and Ineko Arima, each renowned for playing eminently modern women who have been wronged by the men around them—to craft a fragmentary, perpetually shapeshifting work on the relationship between performance and trauma.

A Story Written with Water
Friday, December 8 at 6:00 p.m.

Japan Society – 333 E. 47th Street

Bearing a title inspired by John Keats’s epitaph and taken from the Yōjirō Ishizaka novel it adapts, Yoshida’s first independent film is a startling affair, depicting the unbreakable love of mother and child.

For full descriptions of the films and to learn more about Kijū Yoshida, please visit Film at Lincoln Center’s website.

Free Tickets to Mamoru Hosoda’s SCARLET

Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet

About Scarlet

Remaining Japanese Films at NYAFF

24th New York Asian Film Festival

Saturday, July 19 at 9:15 p.m.

Sunday, July 20 at 12:30 p.m.

Sunday, July 20 at 3:15 p.m.

Sunday, July 20 at 4:30 p.m.

Sunday, July 20 at 6:15 p.m.

Sunday, July 20 at 9:00 p.m.

Tuesday, July 22 at 6:00 p.m.

Friday, July 25 at 9:00 p.m.

Sunday, July 27 at 6:00 p.m.

Film Set in Japan’s Countryside Part of Film at Lincoln Center Series

The Height of Coconut Trees

Discount for JCNYC Members

About The Height of Coconut Trees

New Directors/New Films 2025

Kurosawa Oscar-Winner at Film at Lincoln Center

Dersu Uzala at Film at Lincoln Center

Dersu Uzala

Film at Lincoln Center to Spotlight Japan’s Cinematic Rebel

The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida

Lineup

LEARN MORE