Yoichi Sai
1949 (75 лет)His 2004 film Chi to hone won four Japanese Academy Awards, including two for Sai himself, for Best Director and Best Screenplay. He had previously received two nominations in the same categories for Tsuki wa dotchi ni dete iru. In 1999 he shot Buta no mukui (The Pig's Retribution), a film set in the lavish natural scenery of Okinawa, inspired by the 1996 Akutagawa Prize-winning eponymous novel by Eiki Matayoshi. The film won the Don Quixote prize at Locarno International Film Festival in 1999.
He won the award for Best Screenplay at the 11th Yokohama Film Festival for A Sign Days.
As an actor, he appeared in Nagisa Oshima's 1999 film Taboo. He is the current president of the Directors Guild of Japan.
Via Okinawa
Yôichi Sai
Anna Nakagawa, Ryo Ishibashi
During the Vietnam War era, the influx of American soldiers to Okinawa boosted the local economy and introduced many bars and nightclubs. With exhausting displays of energy, Sai presents a whirlwind romance between a local rocker and the daughter of a mixed American-Okinawan marriage.
Via Okinawa
Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
Yôichi Sai
Kaoru Kobayashi, Kippei Shiina
A Labrador retriever named Quill begins specialized training as a guide dog from an early age, then the canine is paired with a blind man who is initially reluctant to rely on his new partner.
Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
Blood and Bones
Yôichi Sai
Takeshi Kitano, Hirofumi Arai
In 1923, teenager Kim Shun-Pei moves from Cheju Island, in South Korea, to Osaka, in Japan. Along the years, he becomes a cruel, greedy and violent man and builds a factory of kamaboko, processed seafood products, in his poor Korean-Japanese community exploiting his employees.
Blood and Bones
Dog Race
Yôichi Sai
Gorô Kishitani, Ren Osugi
Ethnically Korean Japanese filmmaker Yoichi Sai directs this madcap crime comedy. Nakayama (Goro Kishitani) is a suave police detective who doesn't play by the rules. He busts a drug ring, but not before sampling a few of the wares, and he closes down an underaged prostitution ring after enjoying the company of a school girl hooker. One of duties is to shake down sniveling Korean gangster Hideyoshi (Ren Osugi) for information. In spite of their positions on opposite sides of the law, the two discover that they share a fair amount in common. A disregard for the law and the love of a comely prostitute from China named Momo-chan (Makoto Togashi). Though Hideyoshi is running an illegal alien smuggling ring with her and has lusted for her from a far for quite a while, Nakayama manages to bed her first. When she does finally appear in Hideyoshi's bed, she's unfortunately a corpse.
Dog Race
Taboo
Nagisa Ōshima
Takeshi Kitano, Ryuhei Matsuda
Set during Japan's Shogun era, this film looks at life in a samurai compound where young warriors are trained in swordfighting. A number of interpersonal conflicts are brewing in the training room, all centering around a handsome young samurai named Sozaburo Kano. The school's stern master can choose to intervene, or to let Kano decide his own path.
Taboo
遙かな時代の階段を
Kaizô Hayashi
Masatoshi Nagase, Kiyotaka Nanbara
Broke, with his vintage Nash convertible repossessed, private eye Mike Hama is reduced to combing the mean streets of the Yokohama waterfront on a borrowed bicycle. But when Lily, a beautiful stripper from out of Hama's past, returns to town, the fuse is lit on a criminal powder keg set to blow the lid off the Yokohama underworld.
The Stairway to the Distant Past
黒いドレスの女
Yôichi Sai
Tomoyo Harada, Toshiyuki Nagashima
A woman named Fujiki Asuka arrives as an acquaintance of a sister in law for a day under the bar master Tamura who had guided Yakuza's escaping as a shoji. Tamura who lives on the second floor of the store for the time being the son who wants to work here. A few days later, Tamura finds a handgun from Yuko's baggage and holds a suspicion ....
The Lady in a Black Dress
ルート２２５
Yoshihiro Nakamura
Mikako Tabe, Chikara Iwata
Two kids, fourteen-year-old Eriko and her thirteen-year-old brother Daigo, suddenly find themselves trapped in a parallel universe. Most things are the same as in their own world, but their parents are missing from home and are only contactable when using one particular phonecard.
Route 225
マークスの山
Yôichi Sai
Kiichi Nakai, Masato Hagiwara
Assistant police inspector Aida is assigned to investigate the murder of a former gang member. When a justice ministry official is killed days later in a similar manner, he begins to suspect that something bigger is going on...
MARKS
수
Yôichi Sai
Ji Jin-hee, Oh Man-seok
Tae-soo tries to steal from a gang. The gang catches Tae-Soo's brother, Tae-Jin, instead. The incident causes the brothers to separate. Tae-Soo becomes a mob fixer and an assassin. Tae-Jin becomes a police detective. When a call brings the brothers together, they get ready for brotherly bonding, but Tae-Jin gets killed. Tae-Soo decides to get revenge on his brother's killer.
Soo
