Tadashi Imai

Quote:
A three part-film based on short stories about the difficult lot of women in the early Meiji era. This is the film that swept almost all the Japanese awards for the year of Tokyo Story and Ugetsu (among others great films) — and lost to the fairly inconsequential Gate of Hell at the Cannes Festival. Imai and Kinoshita (and not Ozu, Naruse or Mizoguchi) were the most popular (and critically acclaimed) directors of the Japanese Golden Age of the 50s. While I find the contemporaneous adulation for Kinoshita beyond my understanding, I have found the few Imai films I’ve seen fairly impressive. And this is no exception.Read More »

The story of a group of young people who organise their own travelling symphony orchestra to provide music for people living in remote villages shortly after the war.Read More »

When a married woman has an affair with a young musician, feudal Japanese law requires that both offenders pay with their lives. However, the woman’s husband blames himself for his wife’s straying and attempts to thwart the law demanding capital punishment.Read More »

“The Time of Reckoning” transforms a screwball-comedy plot into a sober study of a successful businessman with serious relationship problems involving three women: his wife of ten years who announces she is pregnant by another man; a mistress who wants to have a baby with him; and an ex-lover who claims he fathered her son.Read More »

PLOT:
The attempted suicide of his fiancée prompts a Japanese salary-man to read his family chronicles and look back at the life of his ancestors. They were samurai, the military nobility caste who carried out acts of violence at the behest of feudal lords, but suffered even more so under their cruelty, often forced into ritual suicide (seppuku). The women were under constant threat of kidnapping and rape, and the men subjected to arbitrary disfigurement and homosexual slavery … In a radical departure from the usual romanticisation of the samurai, director Tadashi Imai – using period sets and sometimes graphic images – made a film fundamentally critical of medieval Japan’s feudal system and the inhumane samurai code called bushido. In addition, the final two of the eight episodes in the film draw parallels between that and kamikaze pilots of World War II, as well as Japan’s modern achievement-oriented society. Bushido zankoku monogatari was awarded the Golden Bear at the 1963 Berlin International Film Festival.Read More »

Oshima, a rich girl married Shinzo, and her cousin girl Sawa has been jealous of Oshima deeply. Sawa cursed Oshima so Shinzo could not hold her and do anything at all. Shinzo hated Oshima, and he made love with Sawa.Read More »

Summary from IMDb:
The story centres around a border security team in 1935 Korea. Upon receiving new recruits they hold a welcome party including a restaurant owner and his daughter. The border’s commander has a wife (Hara Setsuko) who helps deliver a neighbour’s baby. One day a border guard is killed by a Chinese bandit who is hiding in the area. The dead man’s sister comes to visit and is given help to further her studies. The film was shot in Korea featuring many Korean actors and crew.Read More »

Quote:
Everyday, 12 April 2006
Author: sharptongue from Sydney, Australia

The style is equivalent to the kitchen sink dramas which came to prominence in the 1950s. No kitchen sinks here, but plenty of the gritty (or, more accurately, muddy) details of everyday life on rice farms and fishing boats, where the only labour-saving device is a cow to pull a rotary hoe – and the cow is only on hire. Much screen time is devoted to planting and harvesting the rice, and catching fish and eels on the lake. Punishing work, liked by no-one.Read More »

Quote:
Tower of the Lilies is the true story of a group of high school girls on the island of Okinawa, who were mobilized into military service as nurses in the closing months of World War II.

The girls, around 200 in all, were thrust into the Battle of Okinawa, one of the fiercest and bloodiest battles in the Pacific. Known as the Himeyuri Corps, they were ordered to join the medical units in large bunker caves where injured soldiers received treatment.Read More »