CONFESSIONS (Japan, 2010)
Directed by: Tetsuya Nakashima
Starring: Takako Matsu, Masaki Okada, Yoshino Kimura

In 2004, director Tetsuya Nakashima made KAMIKAZE GIRLS, and it played to great acclaim at the New York Asian Film Festival. In 2006, he made MEMORIES OF MATSUKO which had its North American premiere at our festival and took the Audience Award by storm. Now, three years later, in 2010, we are proud to present the international premiere of his new movie (out on June 5 in Japan) CONFESSION.

Reigning in his impulse to create surreal candy-colored worlds full of chaos and confusion, Nakashima opts instead for an intense drama throbbing with dark emotions and powered by a savage central performances. Television heroine, Takako Matsu, plays a middle-school teacher whose four-year-old daughter is murdered. Shattered, she finally returns to her classroom, only to become convinced that two of her students were responsible for her daughter's death. No one believes her, and she may very well be wrong, but she decides that it’s time to take her revenge. What happens next is all-out psychological warfare waged against her students in an attempt to force them into confessing what she knows in her heart to be true: they are guilty. And it's true: they all turn out to be guilty, but not of the crime she thinks they committed.

Nakashima wrote this movie with the idea of turning his lead actresses image on its head, and he said he would not shoot it without her. To select the 33 students in her class he auditioned over 1000 Japanese teenagers. The result is a richly polished, deeply disturbing, emotionally devastating film that we are proud to introduce to American audiences.

Presented in association with Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film (July 1 - 16, 2010)