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We recently profiled 15 Filmmakers At The Forefront Of The TV Revolution, and a filmmaker headed to the small screen before many of the directors on that list is Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Back in 2012, he brought the five-part "Penance" to Japanese television, and later it screened internationally at the Venice Film Festival, Tiff and more. It's taken a couple of years, but now you'll be able to experience the drama on the big screen, and today we have an exclusive clip from the series.  Starring Kyoko Koizumi, Teruyuki Kagawa, Yu Aoi, Eiko Koike, Sakura Ando, Chizuru Ikewaki, Mirai Moriyama, Kenji Mizuhashi, Ryo Kase, Tomoharu Hasegawa, Ayumi Ito, Hirofumi Arai and Tetsushi Tanaka, and based on the novel by Kanae Minato, the story centers around the kidnapping and killing of a young girl named Emili. Her grief-stricken mother Asako, frustrated at the crime going unsolved, lays the burden on the four girls who...

Director Atsuhiro Yamada has uploaded a trailer for his 2008 film Happy Ending, which will be getting its theatrical release at Shibuya Uplink X on June 26, 2010. Yamada was able to make this film through a scholarship he received for winning the Grand Prix of the 2007 Yamagata International Movie Festival with his independent short film "My First Kiss". Happy Ending has since been screened at the 2009 Austin Film Festival and the 2010 Oxford Film Festival, winning an audience award at the former.

Chances are if you've seen many Japanese movies over the past decade or so, you'll vaguely recognize the film's star, Nahana, as she tends to get lots of small but memorable roles. She was one of the rooftop girls in Sion Sono's "Suicide Club", she played the pair of legs featured in the Hagane segment of the 2006 horror anthology film "Unholy Women", and she fried Minase Yashiro's tempura-battered arm in...