My Voiceless Friends (1972)
A man who survived the war carries the will of his comrades in arms, walking across the country visiting the bereaved families.
A man who survived the war carries the will of his comrades in arms, walking across the country visiting the bereaved families.
Kiyoshi AtsumiTamiji Nishiyama
Michiko Araki
Etsuko Ichihara
Shinjirō Ehara
Mayumi Ogawa
Hideji Ōtaki
Junkichi Orimoto
Yoshi Katō
A story about the effect of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on a boy's life and the lives of the Japanese people.

Three years after the Hiroshima bombing, a teenager helps a group of orphans to survive and find their new life.

In the black market, a war orphan is confronted with the struggles of people living in the immediate aftermath of WWII.

In postwar Tokyo, beloved writer-professor Hyakken Uchida retires and is buoyed through hardship by the fierce devotion of his former students, who honor him each year with a raucous “Not yet!” birthday toast. Told in warm, gently comic vignettes, Kurosawa’s farewell celebrates aging, friendship, and the sustaining ritual of teacher and pupils refusing to say goodbye.

Just after WW2, a romance between an innkeeper and a man with tuberculosis unravels near a thermal spring.

In the teeming black markets of postwar Japan, Shozo Hirono and his buddies find themselves in a new war between factious and ambitious yakuza.

Leftist radical-turned-terrorist Giorgio—hiding out in Latin America since the 1970s—turns himself in as soon as the Berlin Wall falls. Wishing to lead a comfortable, bourgeois life in his native Italy, he cuts a deal with a dirty cop, getting his sentence reduced in return for ratting former comrades out. Once released, Giorgio obsessively pursues his dream of becoming an upright citizen, but his old police aquaintance keeps dragging him down...

Set in Tokyo in 1940, the peaceful life of the Nogami Family suddenly changes when the father, Shigeru, is arrested and accused of being a Communist. His wife Kayo works frantically from morning to night to maintain the household and bring up her two daughters with the support of Shigeru's sister Hisako and Shigeru's ex-student Yamazaki, but her husband does not return. WWII breaks out and casts dark shadows on the entire country, but Kayo still tries to keep her cheerful determination, and sustain the family with her love. This is an emotional drama of a mother and an eternal message for peace.

A neurotic, twice-divorced sci-fi writer moves back in with his mother to solve his personal problems.

The background is Yuraku-cho in Tokyo and the film shows how desperately the women, who had led sheltered lives before the war, struggled to keep alive and the innate strength of post-war women.

A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of intergenerational relationships, Good Morning tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists. Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic I Was Born, But . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.

Unexpected love blossoms when an assistant district attorney agrees to take a recidivist shoplifter home so she doesn't have to spend Christmas alone in jail.

A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami when a pickpocket steals his gun on a hot, crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo’s sweltering streets for the stray dog whose desperation has led him to a life of crime. With each step, cop and criminal’s lives become more intertwined and the investigation becomes an examination of Murakami’s own dark side.

In the city of Yokosuka, Kinta and his lover Haruko, both involved with yakuza, brave the post-occupation period with a goal to be together.

Years ago, the young Five Fingers fought for the rural town of Marseilles against brutal police oppression. Now, after fleeing in disgrace, Tau, one of them, returns to Marseilles, seeking only a peaceful life. When he finds the town under new threat, he must reluctantly fight to free it.

A gentle, war-shattered ex-soldier, Kinji Kameda, arrives in wintry Hokkaidō and is pulled into a volatile tangle of love and pity between the disgraced Taeko Nasu, the proud Ayako, and his possessive friend Akama. Kameda’s saintly compassion exposes everyone’s wounds, steering the quartet toward jealousy, violence, and inexorable tragedy. Adapted from Dostoevsky’s novel.

An aging foundry patriarch, gripped by terror of nuclear annihilation, tries to uproot his family to Brazil. When they petition to have him declared incompetent, a family-court counselor witnesses his obsession slide into ruin—and asks whether ignoring the atomic threat is any saner.

Eustacia Vye, an exquisite beauty despairing at her boring life on an English moor, sets up a fateful lovers' triangle when she uses her wiles to entice two men, a dashing suitor and a successful man who made his name abroad and returned to his home on the heath.

A young Tokyo salary man and his wife struggle within the confines of their passionless relationship while he has an extramarital affair.