Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on April 2011

Fashion fans won’t want to miss L’amour fou (2010; pictured), a documentary on late designer Yves Saint-Laurent and his longtime lover and business partner, Pierre Berge. The film follows the designer’s long career, which started him as assistant to Christian Dior in the ’50s. Berge would help Saint-Laurent overcome his shyness to become one of the most influential designers of all time. After his death in 2008, Berge sold his art collection in a controversial, record-setting auction, also covered in the film… Every year around April 26, the anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl incident, Pole Pole (4-4-1 Higashi Nakano, Nakano-ku; www.mmjp.or.jp/pole2) runs a program of films exploring issues of nuclear power. This year’s event, starting April 23, will be all the more poignant due to the 25th anniversary of the Soviet disaster and the unfolding events in Fukushima. The lineup includes Nadya’s Village (1997) about photographer Seichi Motohashi’s trip inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone, where he discovered an abandoned, six-house village, and Horinoshima (2010), about fishermen protesting a planned nuclear plant in southern Japan…