Neuigkeiten

“The Love and Adventures of Kuroki Taro” is a weird film, even by Atg standards. It begins by showing Kuroki Taro and two other stuntmen in their line of work, even stating that “in this film, the stuntman is the star”. However, apart from these introductory scenes, the movie does not show any more behind the scenes footage in a film-about-film fashion, instead focusing on three different stories involving the titular character, and a side one, all of which are narrated by one of the initial characters, Juichi Ito. This last one is a rather personal one for Morisaki since he drew extensively from the war diary of his older brother Minato, who killed himself by harakiri the day after Japan's surrender.

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The first story involves Kuroki playing games with the police, essentially making them chase him by acting...

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Two of the most anticipated Japanese films showing at the Venice Film Festival this year — Kei Ishikawa’s mystery drama A Man (2022) and a digitally remastered version of Yasujirō Ozu’s timeless classic A Hen in the Wind (1948) — share a uniquely curious distinction. The two Japanese films, separated by 74 years, were both written in the exact same room.

Ozu, one of the great masters of cinema history, famously spent long stretches of the 1940s and 1950s — his most productive period — residing and working at Chigasaki-kan, a small ryokan, or traditional Japanese inn, located on a quiet stretch of coast to the southwest of Tokyo. Ozu’s hideaway within the inn was its “niban no oheya,” or “room 2.” A modest space befitting an Ozu drama, the room was designed in Japan’s traditional washitsu style: tatami mats, a simple floor-level table and sliding shoji...