Sachiko Murase

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 »

How a young second lieutenant becomes your basic Bond is the subject of this spy-vs.-spy noir set in 1938 at the start of the Sino-Japanese War. Jiro (Raizo Ichikawa) leaves his fiancée for a mysterious military assignment — he and a few good men are to be trained as special agents at the newly established Nakano Spy School, based on the British model. (The girlfriend, meanwhile, becomes involved in the machinations of the British themselves.) A True Fiction-style narrative offers both lessons in spying (bring your notepad, and a sense of humor) and the lessons of spying: for all its worldly ideals, and even without uniforms, the Spy School is a microcosm of a closed society.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 »