Films with:

Akasen chitai Street of shame /

The final film of director Kenji Mizoguchi follows the lives of five prostitutes in the Yoshiwara region of Tokyo. Each has a different story and different plans, but they all share an uncertain future as they face the outlawing of their profession.

DVD 8604

Jigokumon

In the midst of epic, violent intrigue in twelfth-century Japan, an imperial warrior falls for a lady-in-waiting; even after he discovers she is married, he goes to extreme lengths to win her love.

DVD 9655

Rashōmon

Set in the Middle Ages, the nature of truth and subjective reality are probed in a series of flashbacks from four viewpoints to present the case history of a man's murder and the rape of his wife by a bandit.

DVD 1684

Teahouse of the August moon

Okinawa 1946- occupied by American troops whose assignment is to bring democracy to the inhabitants. The captain in charge is a well-meaning but inept loser, and faces a wily oriental interpreter and a determined geisha girl, along with villagers who know how to take advantage of foreign occupation!

DVD 5902

Three films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

Pitfall: When a miner leaves his employer 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. Woman in the dunes: An amateur entomologist leaves Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert. When he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. The face of another: Okuyama, after being burned and disfigured in an industrial accident and estranged from his family and friends, agrees to his psychiatrist's radical experiment: a face transplant, created from the mold of a stranger. As Okuyama is thus further alienated from the world around him, he finds himself giving in to his darker temptations.

DVD 4824

Ugetsu

In sixteenth century Japan a village potter and his brother-in-law set out for the city to seek their fortunes in the spoils of war. Their neglected wives suffer the bitter consequences of their husbands' ambition as one is murdered by soldiers and the other is raped and becomes a prostitute.

DVD 4696

Ukigusa

An aging actor returns to the town where his son lives, who has believed all these years that he is his uncle rather than his father.

DVD 8127

Ukigusa monogatari A story of floating weeds /

In 1959, Yasujiro Ozu remade his 1934 silent film: A Story of Floating Weeds in color and sound with the cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashomon, Ugetsu). Setting his later version in a seaside location, Ozu otherwise preserves the details of his elegantly simple plot wherein an aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunities with his former lover and illegitimate son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all. A Story of Floating Weeds reveals Ozu in the midst of developing his mode of expression; Floating weeds reveals his distinct style at its pinnacle. In each, the director captures the joy and sadness in everyday life.

DVD 4584