The Most Beautiful Night in the World (2008)

Watch movie

Director Daisuke Tengan, son of acclaimed Japanese writer and filmmaker Shohei Imamura (The Eel, Vengeance is Mine), weaves this fanciful tale of a small seaside village with the highest birthrate in all of Japan. Set in the early 1990s, the ambitious rural epic follows a collection of small town eccentrics from Kaname as they eagerly await the arrival of the Prime Minister. In recent years, fewer married couples have been having children and women are waiting until they are much older to marry. Since the town of Kaname has such an impressive birthrate, the Prime Minster is planning to personally bestow its citizens a special award for excellence in procreation. The post-bubble economy in Japan is booming, everyone seems to have a cell phone and it isn't unusual to find vending machines that are fully stocked with schoolgirls' underwear. Newspaper reporter Kazuya Mizuno (Tomorrow Taguchi) has been exiled to Kaname following a high profile sex scandal. Kaname is the kind of town where little of note ever really happened, and as Mizuno gradually gets to know the locals he forms a growing fixation on widowed bar owner Teruko. Teruko is still in her thirties, and the spell she casts over Mizuno is absolutely undeniable. Before long, the entranced journalist is bearing witness to a virtual sexual revolution. As reality begins to distort and the bizarre story comes to an orgiastic climax, the power of the orgasm becomes plain for all to see.