Directed by Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu was Japanese cinema’s great poet of everyday life, and he remains one of the most significant film artists who ever lived. From the late 1920s to the early ’60s, Ozu explored the rhythms and tensions of a country trying to reconcile modern and traditional values, especially as played out in relations between the generations. Though he is best known for his 1953 masterpiece TOKYO STORY, Ozu began his career in the silent era in a looser mode, with comedies like I WAS BORN, BUT . . . and gangster movies like DRAGNET GIRL. He then gradually mastered the domestic drama during the war years and afterward, employing both humor, as in GOOD MORNING, and distilled drama, as in LATE SPRING, before the final blossoming of his art in such late color triumphs as AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON. With its instantly recognizable hallmarks—static shots, often from the vantage point of someone sitting low on a tatami mat; patient pacing; moments of transcendence represented by the isolated beauty of everyday objects—Ozu’s rigorous style has influenced filmmakers as various as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Claire Denis, and Paul Schrader.