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“I can say with absolute conviction that no Japanese filmmaker makes a film without being conscious of Shinji Sômai’s existence… [Sômai] convinced the Japanese audience at the time that ‘cinema is not dead yet.’… For anyone who wants to see a movie that has the power to change and sustain your life, I urge you to see Shinji Sômai’s films.”— Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
Shinji Sômai’s tragic death at age 53 in 2001 robbed Japanese cinema of one of its foremost talents, a poet of alienation, frustration, and youthful revolt whose 13 films show a distinct and compassionate perspective, likened by critic Chris Fujiwara to that of Jean Vigo and Nicholas Ray for his lyrical depictions of adolescence. Revered in his native country—where his admirers include Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Hirokazu Kore-eda—but too-little-screened abroad, Sômai’s revelatory cinema can be experienced here with recent restorations of three of his greatest evocations of youth in all of its loneliness, rage, and beauty.