Season 1: Monstrous Realities

Taxi Blues 택시블루스
This movie offers a candid, compelling and at times uncomfortable glimpse into the lives of the approximately 70,000 taxi drivers operating in Seoul. Director Choi-ha spent a summer as a driver in this city of over 10 million people with a hidden camera placed under the rearview mirror.

Devils on the Doorstep 鬼子来了
During the last years of Sino-Japanese War, a Chinese villager becomes responsible for the lives of two prisoners from the Japanese Imperial Army—should he kill them or set them free?

When the Bough Breaks 危巢
One of the most important female filmmakers in China, Ji Dan spent three years following a migrant worker family living on the outskirts of Beijing, as the family’s three children fight against all odds – including their own parents – to continue their education and pursue a better future.

A2
On March 20, 1995, members of Aum, a small Buddhist sect, released sarin gas into rush hour crowds in the Tokyo subway system.

Pietà 피에타
A young, solitary loan shark collects paybacks from customers with extreme brutality. While he maims and emotionally cripples many of his customers, their suffering leaves him cold. One day, a mysterious woman appears in front of him claiming to be his long-lost mother. Although he violently rejects her at first, he gradually accepts her into his life and allows her to change his ways.

Paranoia Agent 妄想代理人
A young woman appears to have been violently beaten by a mysterious assailant she believes to be a boy on roller-blades wielding a baseball bat. But as detectives chase the trail of the juvenile attacker, dubbed “bat boy,” uncanny connections between subsequent victims, including the detective himself, reveal the victims’ secret anxieties, in a surreal, biting critique of our urban selves.

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer 鉄男Ⅱ
Shot around the densely urbanized Tokyo landscape of concrete and steel, Tetsuo II is a classic 1990s cyberpunk film in the sci-fi (kaijû)/horror genre from the auteur director Tsukamoto Shinya (1960- ).
