Hold Up Down

A salaryman is hijacked by bank robbers.

Kanjaki, a middle-aged man, goes to a quiet countryside village. He puts his helmet on a shrunken old woman whom he meets by chance in a shop. As soon as he presses the buttons on the helmet one by one, she suddenly remembers forgotten happy moments and is rejuvenated. This is just the beginning. Kanjaki goes on to make the village people recall their happy pasts, but his face is lined with worry and a sadness that deepens. What is the secret of this helmet? And what is he trying to do with it? Director Sabu’s Happiness suggests happiness and suffering are intertwined through the unusual scenario of a helmet reminding people of the happiest moments of their lives. Sabu convincingly portrays the notion that memory is the source of both happiness and suffering, and how memory affects our lives.

Existential study on a misplaced workers and ex-prisoner who moves through the city and his influence on other characters' lives.

A dark and strange comedy about a bank robber with bad luck. Bungling a bank robbery turns out to be a profitable mistake for Yamazaki (Shin'ichi Tsutsumi), an amateur crook who ends up with 80 million yen after a string of improbable accidents. But having so much cash doesn't make his life is any easier. In fact, it gets much more complicated when Yamazaki stabs a hairdresser by mistake and instantly becomes a hunted fugitive. He's just one unlucky monkey -- but can he turn his luck around?

A doctor and his family receive an unexpected delivery from an old friend at their remote country home - a large wooden crate containing a gun, a female zombie and an instruction sheet telling them not to feed her meat. The family is concerned, of course, but she seems harmless enough. Perhaps she can help clean up outside?

An unemployed man trying to steal from a convenience store, and the store clerk catches him in the act... the thief runs away with the store-clerk right after him. All the while, the store clerk is in trouble with a low-rank yakuza. Along the chase for the thief, they catch the eye of the Yakuza who's been looking for the convenience store clerk

Things are hectic in heaven. Dozens of scribes sit before a long scroll incessantly scribbling away. They are composing the biographies of earth-dwellers. What is invented by the men in heaven is lived out below. And their employer, God, is increasingly vehement in demanding avant-garde ideas. Take, for example, the beautiful Yuri, a girl who dies in a car crash. Some of the heavenly scribes find this very dull and send former gangster Chas, who has become a heavenly tea-boy, back down to earth with instructions to save Yuri no matter what. And so Chas ends up in Okinawa, gets to know the earth-dwellers, interferes in their fates, becomes celebrated as 'Mr Angel' and is hounded by brutal enemies. His falling in love with Yuri is of course a foregone conclusion. But no one could anticipate what happens next. Not even God himself

The story concerns a boy called Shuji, growing up in a rural area of Japan where the community is divided into "Shore" and "Offshore" - the latter so-named because it is built on reclaimed land. He meets a few main characters, besides his family, that shape his development - gangster Oni-ken (Susumu Terajima) and his hostess girlfriend, an ominous-looking Catholic priest and his congregation-of-one, the troubled and rebellious teenage girl Eri - who also becomes Shuji's classmate and the object of his adolescent affections. Life in the Shore/Offshore community is not a bundle of joy - the impression is of a community and lifestyle in decay, with the only hope of rejuvenation being a gangster-funded hotel development project that doesn't exactly inspire the locals either. It's an environment that does not fill its young inhabitants with much hope or inspiration.

On board at the boat Kanikosen, where fish and crabs preserves, forced workers to work under miserable conditions, with minimum wages. Some can not cope with conditions and even death from malnutrition, and is also the supervisor of the more vicious variety. Shinjo, one of the employees, trying to convince the others that they will get good luck and fortune in his next life, and persuades them because they commit suicide to get there faster. It ends, however, in a single major failure. Rather than flee Shinjo being picked up by a Russian ship. Once there, he is overwhelmed by the social conditions that are completely different from those he has just left and decided therefore to return to Kanikosen to save their employees.