Film program «Japan Retrospective | AFFBCN 2025 »

Casa Asia dedicates its retrospective to Japan, bringing together a selection of award-winning titles from the festival's various editions between 2015 and 2025. Through this program, the AFFBCN It offers a journey through diverse perspectives on contemporary Japanese cinema, inviting audiences to discover the aesthetic, narrative, and human diversity that characterizes a film industry often less known in the West than it deserves. True to its spirit of exploration and intercultural dialogue, the festival seeks to give voice to filmmakers of different generations and sensibilities, whose works reflect the tensions, emotions, and transformations of contemporary Japanese society.

From the dramatic introspection of Eternally Younger Than Those Idiots (Ryohei Yoshino, 2021), which portrays youth marked by invisible violence and the search for meaning, to the delicate emotional comedy Only the Cat Knows (Syoutarou Kobayashi, 2019), where loss and daily coexistence reveal the fragility of family ties, this retrospective brings us closer to a universe of contained emotions and minimal gestures.

The cycle is completed with the documentary Inland Sea (Kazuhiro Soda, 2018), an observational work that sensitively and respectfully captures the daily life of the inhabitants of Ushimado, a small fishing village fading away amidst the modernization of contemporary Japan. With its measured pace and humanist perspective, Soda offers a moving testament to memory, the passage of time, and the dignity of work.

Taken as a whole, this Japan Retrospective celebrates the richness and depth of recent Japanese cinema, offering viewers, users and festival followers a unique opportunity to reconnect with universal stories told from an intimate and deeply human perspective.

Programme