These touchingly humanist tales discover unexpected beauty where few would think to look. In Satsuki Okawa’s intimate, gently humorous short TIDY UP, a brother and sister find themselves at odds over how to deal with their deceased mother’s home, which has become a hoarder’s haven now full of memories. Characters also find refuge amid unusual circumstances in Akira Kurosawa’s intensely personal DODES’KA-DEN—the master director’s first film in color, which he uses to blazing, expressionistic effect—which compassionately portrays the struggles and dreams of a band of social outcasts living in a rubbish dump outside Tokyo.
Directed by Satsuki Okawa • 2011 • Japan, United States
Following the death of his hoarder mother, a young man eagerly looks forward to cleaning out her junk-strewn home—but first he’ll have to contend with his sister, who is intent on preserving the house just as it is—in this tender look at gr...
Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1970 • Japan
By turns tragic and transcendent, Akira Kurosawa's film follows the daily lives of a group of people barely scraping by in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo. Yet as desperate as their circumstances are, each of them, the homeless father and son envisionin...
