Rainbow Reel Competition 2023
We have a wonderful selection of Japanese films this year!
The Grand Prize is hanging on your vote!
Veils
Ayumi Tani, an owner of a small bookstore, and Sayaka Murakami, a call center worker, are a lesbian couple living together.
While they feel somewhat stifled by the fact that they are part of the LGBTQ community,
they are looking forward to having a wedding-style photo shoot to celebrate their five-year anniversary.
Sayaka finds a site for searching photo salons advertising “LGBTQ available” and enthusiastically makes an inquiry,
but one photo salon’s disappointing response angers them.
Ayumi decides to go confront the photo salon in person, even though Sayaka tries to stop her.
Will Ayumi’s words reach Ms. Oshima, an experienced staff of the salon?
Will there be a place where Ayumi and Sayaka can enjoy their own slice of happiness?
Director：Erika NAKAYAMA
2021｜Japan｜19 min｜Japanese
[Romance][Drama] / [L]
Sayaka and Ayumi
Sayaka and Ayumi have been together for 7 years. One morning they both overslept. What will happen? Prolog to the short film “Veils”, which was nominated almost 50 times in 2022 at film festivals in Japan and overseas.
Director：Erika NAKAYAMA
2022｜Japan｜7 min｜Japanese
[Drama] / [L]
Change minority
Yuki, an office worker, and his female partner are heterosexuals living in a minority’s world and thinking about marriage. They live in a society where heterosexuality is not accepted and they suffer from the inability to legally start a family. They come out to their parents, their workplace enforces homosexual norms upon them, and they live their lives interweaved with troubles and sufferings, and finally find their way, in a society where homosexuality is the norm.
Director：Tomoya ASANUMA
2023｜Japan｜8 min｜Japanese
[Drama] / [LGBTQ+]
Living Through
This is a documentary film that documented a potluck of middle aged and senior sexual minorities, held at an NPO Purple Hands. Sexual minorities who retire often find themselves in different states of loneliness because of prejudice and inadequacies in laws to protect them. Many feel uncertain about their retirement. The film’s director wanted people to see how happy the Platinum generation live their lives, so that they would have less worries about their future. The director also wants the audience to listen to their stories, and learn that the understanding in society about sexual minorities is changing bit by bit, and that our future is getting better.
Director：Tsuyoshi SHOJI
2023｜Japan｜10 min｜Japanese
[Documentary] / [G]
(c)Minomushi Films
Normal
It’s spring. Manami and Kyoko are a normal lesbian couple. The two were to have a wonderful future promised for them but, things change. This is a love story about two normal lesbians during cherry blossom season.
Director：Naoto TSUKIASHI
2022｜Japan｜22 min｜Japanese
[Romance][Drama] / [L]
GMT+9
GMT+9 (2022) is a nuanced portrait of two Japanese women who want to live together as a couple in Berlin. The plot is based on a collage of interviews and stories that circulated in the authors’ surroundings. The fictional setting creates conditions in which issues that would otherwise be repressed in a kind of self-censorship can be expressed relentlessly.
The two main characters speak of shame, secrecy, and the impossibility of unfolding in ways they demand of themselves. The ideal of openness unwittingly becomes a burden for the protagonists. Berlin is not the imagined place of longing, and the freedom they envisioned is in fact their entry into a fierce economy of self-assertion.……。
Director：Nom de Guerre (Sugano MATSUSAKI / Jonas Beile)
2022｜Germany｜30 min｜Japanese
[Drama] / [L]
STRANGE
One evening a shy suburban Tokyo high school student, Odeko, meets a tearful Kuma dressed in drag in a park.
As their earnest friendship develops, Kuma’s struggle to live confidently with himself changes Odeko’s timidity as well.
Director：Ken OCHIAI
2023｜Japan｜15 min｜Japanese
[Drama] / [G]
