BIFFF: John Harford Williams' STARFISH HOTEL, starring Kôichi Satô, Kiki, Akira Emoto, Tae Kimura,

The official website for John Harford Williams' Starfish Hotel - a.k.a. "Sutâfisshu Hoteru" - is online, although at present it's just a home page. The movie is scheduled to have its world première at the 24th Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film (BIFFF) in Belgium on March 24th at 6:30 p.m. (18:30).

The screenplay for Starfish Hotel was written by Williams (who, BTW, is a co-founder and the representative director of 100 Meter Films Y.K. / Y.K. Hyaku-Mêtoru Eigasha). The movie apparently stars Kôichi Satô, Kiki, Akira Emoto, Tae Kimura, and Kazuyoshi Kushida.

Here's a description of Starfish Hotel from the English-language page (see below for link) for the movie on the BIFFF website: "Yuichi Arisu is a typical office slave in the huge, impersonal city of Tokyo. Every night he commutes home to his distant wife and buries himself in the mystery novels of Jo Kuroda, a writer who has conjured up a strange alternative universe called the Darkland. Then, one night, his wife disappears. Does this have something to do with what happened two years ago. On a business trip to a snow-bound town in the far north of Japan, Arisu had an affair with a young woman called Kayoko. Arisu traces his wife to a private detective and then to an underground brothel called Wonderland. But the brothel burns down and the detective is murdered. Arisu becomes the main suspect. Gradually the walls between fantasy and reality break down and Arisu comes under the spell of the Darkland. ¶ British director John Williams (Firefly Dreams) has lived in Japan for 17 years. In Starfish Hotel, he blends American detective fiction and the Japanese supernatural tale to create an original Gothic mystery. The film borrows its visual style, themes and mood from classic Japanese fantastic films such as Kenji Mizoguchi's The Tale of Ugetsu and Shindo Kaneto's Black Cat and pays homage to mystery writers such as Haruki Murikami. But it will also make you think of cinematic mind trips like Eyes Wide Shut and Donnie Darko. The solid casts consists of Sato Koichi (Samurai Resurrection, Ring 2), Emoto Akira (The Eel, Zatoichi) and Kiki (Shinya Tsukamoto's Vital)."

Starfish Hotel official website
BIFFF: Starfish Hotel (English)