Hisashi Igawa

Google translate:
A masterpiece of crime suspense where a seasoned prosecutor uncovers the perfect crime committed by a young lawyer. In addition to director Hiromichi Horikawa’s direction, you can also enjoy the skills of first-class filmmakers, such as the screenplay by Shinobu Hashimoto and the shadowy imagery of cinematographer Hiroshi Murai. Lawyer Hamano kills the wife of his former teacher who had an affair. After that, Wakita, a thief, was arrested, and after being pursued by prosecutor Ochiai, Wakita confessed to murdering her wife. Hamano gets involved with Ochiai, saying, “The real culprit must be someone else,” out of remorse.Read More »

An elderly woman living in Nagasaki, Japan takes care of her four grandchildren for their summer vacation. They learn about the atomic bomb that fell in 1945, and how it killed their grandfather.Read More »

Quote:
How does a director whose work has long been characterized by its vibrancy deal with the subject of aging and death? With extraordinary patience and grace, it turns out. Madadayo is the last film Akira Kurosawa completed before his death in 1998, and it feels like the work of an artist aware that his time was nearing its end. (The fact that the 1993 film is only now receiving a video release in America after an extremely limited theatrical run doesn’t speak well of current attitudes toward elder greats.) The theme of aging recurs throughout Kurosawa’s later efforts, but never as explicitly as here; even the King Lear-based Ran has other concerns. Read More »

From All Movie Guide:
“Suicide has long been used as a form of social protest in Japan. In this film, set in 1703, samurai culture is being transformed by the emergence of a new merchant class. Elements of the social contract are beginning to unravel, and some unscrupulous people took undue advantage of these changes before the social order was re-created. In this story, a rich merchant gives his clerk an I.O.U. instead of wages. When the impoverished clerk presents the paper to the merchant at the agreed upon time asking for payment, the man flies into a rage and pretends he never wrote it and claims the clerk is trying to defraud him. Then he sets his henchmen on the clerk to administer a beating. Though similar in story and period, this is a different film from the 1969 Double Suicide by director Masahiro Shinoda.”Read More »

A landmark in Japanese cinema, The Far Road is the first feature film planned, produced, and directed as well as starred in by a woman, Sachiko Hidari. Inspired by her many years of work as an actress in the films of such illustrious directors as Heinosuke Gosho and Yasuzo Masumura (also represented in the current series), she uses a spare cinematic style to tell the story of a fight for human dignity: a living wage and job security in the face of mechanization of the railroads. The film was financed by the National Railways Workers Union, whose members, because they work for a “public corporation,” do not have the right to strike.
– BAMPFA (1979)Read More »

When a miner leaves his employers and treks out with his young son to become a migrant worker, he finds himself moving from one eerie landscape to another, intermittently followed (and photographed) by an enigmatic man in a clean, white suit, and eventually coming face-to-face with his inescapable destiny. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s debut feature and first collaboration with novelist Kobo Abe, Pitfall is many things: a mysterious, unsettling ghost story, a portrait of human alienation, and a compellingly surreal critique of soulless industry, shot in elegant black and white.Read More »

Quote:
A beautiful and deeply moving work,it deals with a taboo subject which is rarely treated on the screen.The approach is much different from that of Alain Resnais in “Hiroshima mon amour”,and the main reason is that the director is Japanese.Far from Marguerite Duras’ verbal logorrhea,Kurosawa lets us in the tragedy through children’s eyes,and their simple and naive words.These children,who visit the memorial, only know what the history books tell:almost nothing.Read More »