FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 3, 2025

CINEMA GUILD ACQUIRES SHINJI SOMAI’S THE FRIENDS & LOVE HOTEL IN NEW RESTORATIONS

NEW YORK, NY (Feb 3, 2025) – Cinema Guild announced today the acquisition of North American distribution rights for The Friends (1994) and Love Hotel (1985), two films by Japanese filmmaker Shinji Somai, director of the acclaimed Moving (Cannes 1993 Un Certain Regard, Venice Classics 2023 Best Restored Film award) and Typhoon Club. These are the latest acquisitions in Cinema Guild’s multi-year project of promoting the legacy of the late Somai, who has long been revered in Japan by the likes of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Ryusuke Hamaguchi, but who, until recently, has remained largely unknown abroad. Love Hotel opens on April 4 at Metrograph in New York City before expanding nationwide, while The Friends is slated for a summer theatrical release. Digital and home video releases will follow.

The Friends—newly restored in 4K—follows a group of three wily young boys. In the dog days of summer, the kids discover a decrepit house and the old man (Rentaro Mikuni) who lives there all alone. Up to no good, they spy on him. But as they learn the sad story behind his present wretchedness, they begin to develop an unlikely bond with the old-timer. They even help replant his overgrown garden. Somai’s follow-up to Moving is a summery comic spectacle of movement and play and a stirring contemplation on time’s ravages and delights.

A tale of two broken souls, Love Hotel chronicles the encounter of a call-girl and a married man with a debt to the yakuza, who have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Made in the same year as Typhoon Club, Love Hotel is one of Somai’s most bewitching and unnervingly romantic works, a late masterpiece of Nikkatsu Studio’s legendary Roman Porno cycle of films.

“The more Somai films one sees, the more one understands the depth of his singularity,” said Edward McCarry of Cinema Guild. “We’ve been so pleased to see the love for Somai’s work over the past years. We’re very proud to continue this project with these two films, representing two distinct periods of his production in two very different genres, which nevertheless both exhibit his truly inimitable touch." The deals were negotiated by Peter Kelly and Edward McCarry of Cinema Guild with mk2 and the Nikkatsu Corporation.

Cinema Guild is a premier distributor of world cinema, independent films and documentaries, whose upcoming releases include Matías Piñeiro’s You Burn Me, Hong Sangsoo’s By the Stream, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, and the films of João César Monteiro. Recent releases include Hong Sangsoo’s A Traveler’s Needs, Kazik Radwanski’s Matt and Mara, and Somai’s Moving.

For press inquiries, please contact us at:

(212) 685-6242 or press at cinemaguild dot com

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