Graduating from pink films to the mainstream, Hiroki Ryuichi has built his international reputation with moving, understated films about lonely, alienated women seeking solace in romantic fantasies and transient attachments, such as Tokyo Trash Baby (2000), Vibrator (2003), and Girlfriend: Someone Please Stop the World (2004). In his recent works, including Kabukicho Love Hotel (2014), Hiroki has proved himself as one of contemporary Japanese cinema's most intelligent students of character, as well as one of the most precise analysts of Tokyo's 21st-century zeitgeist and Japan's 21st-century malaise.

Japanese actor Sometani Shota is the recipient of 2015 Screen International Rising Star Award. This marks the second year of a partnership with Screen International, with whom the NYAFF honors an emerging talent in the East Asian film world. At age 22, Sometani is already a leading man in both blockbusters and indie gems and has earned critical ac- claim on the international film festival circuit. In 2010, he delivered an impressive performance as a compulsive liar in Seta Natsuki’s A Liar and a Broken Girl, a twisted blend of teen romance and bloodshed. In 2011, he received the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best New Young Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his performance in Sono Sion’s Himizu, along with his co-star Nikaido Fumi (last year’s recipient of the Screen International Rising Star Award). NYAFF audience already know Sometani from the Pacific War epic Eternal Zero (2013). His recent roles are in Hiroki Ryuichi’s ensemble drama Kabukicho Love Hotel (2014) and Sono’s hip-hop musical Tokyo Tribe (2014), both of which will be screened at this year’s NYAFF.