These are the twelve feature films you shouldn’t miss at the Skip City International D-Cinema Festival which will take place in cinemas from July 15 – 23, 2023 in Saitama, and online from July 22 – 26, 2023.

Reporter Uto has a strong sense of justice and hates lies. When he receives news about an alien abducting a university student in Hakui, Ishikawa, aka UFO Town, he begins an investigation to uncover the lies, but is drawn into a swamp of unexplained incidents. (SkipCity 2023)

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Accused of being an unfit mother by her influential husband, Banu fights for the custody of her son amid the chaos of the final days of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. She has four days to find a single voice to speak on her behalf. (SkipCity 2023)

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Shiori, a psychotherapist, resigns from her clinic after her daughter’s death and begins free consultations at the library. One day, she is asked by priest Hasegawa to meet a troubled believer named Tsujimura, and she heads to the church. (SkipCity 2023)

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Felipe, who takes acting classes behind his mother’s back, is told by the teacher that his father was an actor. Given the opportunity for a film audition, he goes to meet his grandmother, with whom he lost contact after his father’s death. (SkipCity 2023)

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Lars Ostenfeld travels with three scientists on their expeditions to the inland ice of Greenland. They collect data to decipher global warming in deadly circumstances, with blizzards and collapsing ice. (SkipCity 2023)

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Filmmaker Ella Glendining has a very rare impairment. To learn what she needs to love herself even more, despite the pervasiveness of ableism in society, she uses social media to look for someone with the same impairment. (SkipCity 2023)

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Satoshi and his daughter Kaede live quietly in downtown Osaka. “I saw the serial killer that the police are looking for. If I can catch him, we’ll get three million yen”. Kaede thinks it’s one of her father’s typical jokes and ignores it. The next morning, however, Satoshi disappears like a puff of smoke…. (SkipCity 2023)

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Both Hitomi and her daughter Eri are cellists. One day, they are involved in a traffic accident and Hitomi loses her sight. She wears camera-equipped contact lenses and Eri, injured and hospitalized, wears VR goggles, and the two share one vision. (SkipCity 2023)

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A housewife in her 40s who rethinks her life. A single woman in her 30s who is lonely working remotely; a sex worker in her 20s who dreamed of being an actress; a woman in her 40s who has lost her vision and is clinging to the past. Nahana plays these four women struggling through the pandemic. (SkipCity 2023)

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Anne, a junior high school student who doesn’t fit in at school, finds comfort in a dark off-limits staircase. One day, when she looks at the space through a magical kaleidoscope, a door opens and she meets Aina, a student with the same kaleidoscope. (SkipCity 2023)

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Hüseyin, a yogurt vendor living in a Syrian village, takes his daughter Zelal on his motorbike to deliver yogurt to his uncle. They meet a lost boy, Hemudê, in the town of Kobanê, and together with him, they try to sell the yogurt before it goes bad. (SkipCity 2023)

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In 2002, Isamu Kaneko developed the quick file-sharing software “Winny” and made it publicly available. But people who use it for illegal copying are arrested one after another, and Kaneko, as the developer, is also arrested in 2004 for aiding and abetting copyright infringement. (SkipCity 2023)

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For more information, please visit: https://www.skipcity-dcf.jp/en/