Selections of Hamaguchi Ryusuke
"Everyone starts out wanting to be kind." Four best friends who once shared everything find their bond shattered by a single secret. A woman dates a man who looks exactly like her first love—until the real one, long missing, reappears. Upon discovering her friend has fallen for her ex, she abruptly turns back to find him. A recently widowed man meets a silent female chauffeur who changes the course of his grief. From Locarno to Cannes, Berlin, Venice, and the Oscars, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, hailed as the heir to Japan’s cinematic masters, gently yet unflinchingly captures stories of intimacy—at once enchanting and cruel—through his lens.
8 films
Evil Does Not Exist
Passion
Storytellers
Drive My Car
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Happy Hour I
Happy HourⅡ
Asako I & II
Popular
Those irreversible slices of life
Recently, in a novel I've come to love, I found myself grasping the weight of life's slices. In the story, there is a wicked sorcerer who freezes people in the instant just before tragedy strikes—suspending everything, sealing it into a crystal ball, and building an entire museum from these frozen moments. And isn't film, in its own way, just as cruel? As viewers, we are little more than instruments for collecting tissue slices—slipping into a character's world for a single fleeting moment, wandering through it in passing, only to return, in the blink of an eye, to the reality that is our own.