Hiroki Ryuichi is a Japanese film director. He won critical acclaim for 800 Two Lap Runners. Film critic and researcher Alexander Jacoby has described Hiroki as "one of the modern Japanese cinema's most intelligent students of character". Of the directors who have graduated from “pink film” to the mainstream, Hiroki has remained perhaps the most faithful to his origins: he continues to make films on sexual themes, though titillation has given way to analysis. In the eighties, after serving as assistant to prolific “pink” director Genji Nakamura, he made pornographic films for both straight and gay audiences; likewise, his first mainstream feature, 800 Two Lap Runners (1994), explored both hetero- and homosexual feelings in its account of the awkward relationship between a teenage runner and the former girlfriend of the dead trackmate with whom he once had a sexual experience. Hiroki’s next film, Midori, was another drama about adolescent emotions, focusing on a disaffected high school girl who feigns illness to spend time with her boyfriend. Female protagonists continued to be central to Hiroki’s most interesting work, which dealt with young adults and with their sexual conduct in the fragmented society of modern urban Japan. Tokyo Trash Baby, Vibrator, and Girlfriend: Someone Please Stop the World were all moving, understated films about lonely, alienated women seeking solace in romantic fantasy and transient attachments. Hiroki shot these films on digital video, and his informal style, with its loose compositions and low-key performances, effectively dramatized the haphazard lives of his protagonists, insecure both in work and relationships. Darker and more melodramatic in the plot was L’Amant (2004), a coolly observed account of a teenage schoolgirl who sells herself for a year as a sex slave to three brothers. By refusing to pass judgment on the perverse actions it depicted, Hiroki’s detached style forced th Watch drama online for free.