The film is a series of vignettes from Taiji Tonoyama's life and film clips, interspersed with a dialogue to camera by Nobuko Otowa, addressing the camera as if she is addressing Tonoyama himself, recollecting events in his life. The film focuses on Tonoyama's alcohol dependence and his various sexual relationships, as well as his film work with Shindo.
2H combines documentary and dramatic film techniques to depict the psychological passages of two Chinese expatriates in Tokyo as they attempt to accommodate their existence to the two universal events of life - birth and death. Ma Jinsan is a 95 year-old former Kuomintang general who defected to Japan nearly 50 years earlier, shortly after the Communist revolution. Bound to Ma by chance, circumstance, and emotional need, Xiong Wenyun is an avant-garde artist desperately seeking to fulfill an innate but inarticulate desire to have a child.
A Japanese man travels to Beijing in summer to search for his missing friend with only a photograph in his hand.
Xiu Xiu was abducted from her hometown in Hunan and taken to rural Fujian and raised to be a bride. Twenty years later, she tracks down her biological parents and finds they have fallen on hard times.
The film documents a day in the life of Tiananmen Square in 1994, a mere five years after the crushing of a student-led democracy movement in 1989.
The film looks at the history of Yasukuni Shrine in Chiyoda, Tokyo, where more than 2 million of Japan's war dead are enshrined. More than 1,000 of them are war criminals convicted at the 1946–48 Tokyo tribunal, including 14 Class-A war criminals, Hideki Tōjō among them. The film shows not only the widely reported political incidents associated with the shrine, but also takes an in-depth look at the shrine's sword-making tradition, the Yasukuni sword being the film's underlying motif.
Kyoko, a native of Shanghai, China, studied in Japan and later married a Japanese man. However, Kyoko hid a certain fact from her husband about her time in China.
On the eve of the year 2000, two stories centered around money unfold in Beijing. One is the story of a merchant who was poisoned for money -- 1000 years ago. Trapped in a black bowl, the merchant's ghost encounters an old beggar, and regales him with the story of how he came to be inside a bowl. The other story begins in modern times: A debt collector handcuffs an old friend, a poet, who cannot pay back his debt. The poet, who cannot be free of his handcuffs until he returns the money to the debt collector, goes to pick up his lover, while still handcuffed to the debt collector — but the poet's lover too was a prisoner of the debt collector, who escaped, and so all three are become handcuffed together. "Flying Flying" participated in the Youth Forum of the Berlin International Film Festival in 2001, as a 'film banned after 1990.'
Japanese filmmaker Li Ying directs the documentary Aji (Dream Cuisine), a portrait of master chef Hatsue Sato. In her late seventies, Hatsue is one of the last chefs who honor the traditional cooking style of China's Shandong province. She and her husband, Koroku, run a restaurant in Tokyo, but she really wants to move back to China where she was born. The filmmakers follow her to Shandong, where she does a television interview and meets culinary college president Liu Gwangwei. When the modern chef can't seem follow her old-fashioned recipes right, she decides to stay in China and cook them herself. However, husband Koroku doesn't want to change his location.
