Films

Description

*ASIAN PREMIERE*

In this rare melodramatic entry from director OZU Yasujirō’s filmography, TANAKA Kinuyo plays Tokiko, a young wife and mother, who awaits her husband Shuichi’s repatriation from the war. Struggling to make ends meet on her own, she undertakes sex work for one night to pay for her ailing child’s medical treatment. Shuichi’s discovery of this, upon returning home, threatens to unravel their relationship.

TANAKA’s measured, raw emotional performance becomes emblematic of the deeply personal ways in which the traumas of war reverberated across to the women on the homefront. Completed in 1947, the screenplay for a more lighthearted film entitled The Moon Has Risen was meant to be realised as OZU’s second post-WWII film. However, due to production difficulties, the project was shelved in favour of A Hen in the Wind–a more poignant commentary of the harsh realities of Japan’s reconstruction period. The Moon Has Risen was later directed by TANAKA herself in 1955