The Most Beautiful

This portrait of female volunteer workers at an optics plant during World War II, shot on location at the Nippon Kogaku factory, was created with a patriotic agenda. Yet thanks to Akira Kurosawa’s groundbreaking semidocumentary approach, THE MOST BEAUTIFUL is a revealing look at Japanese women of the era and anticipates the aesthetics of Japanese cinema’s postwar social realism.

Starring Takeshi Shimura, Soji Kiyokawa, Ichiro Sugai