Every year, the Seattle International Film Festival brings movies from around the world to theaters. We’re happy to highlight the ones from Japan below.

Capturing Dad

What started out as an adventure of two young girls to reconnect with their long lost dad becomes a journey of self-discovery, reconciliation, growth, and love.

The Great Passage

Tasked with helping edit a new dictionary known as “The Great Passage,” Mitsuya finds himself distracted by his landlord’s beautiful granddaughter in this kindhearted tribute to the power of words.

Key of Life

Japan’s master of screwball comedy Kenji Uchida returns with this cynical and hilarious tale about a failed actor who switches identities with a stranger at a bath house-only to find himself filling the shoes of an elite assassin.

A Man Vanishes

A brilliantly layered documentary masterpiece from 1967, New Wave Japanese director Shohei Imamura investigates a seemingly commonplace occurrence in Japanese society: the disappearance of hundreds of ordinary people.

The Land of Hope

Based on the events following the 2011 Tōhoku disaster, a multigenerational rural family is forced to make impossible choices and painful decisions in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and the resulting nuclear fallout.

Wolf Children

Mamoru Hosoda exhibits his mastery of understated drama and the subtleties of emotion in this beautifully animated film. Hana’s decisions will leave you aching with sweet melancholia. In Japanese with English subtitles.