Event Details
Kurosawa’s first color film, and his initial collaboration with cinematographer Takao Saito, Dodes’ka-den is a heartbreaking, tender series of vignettes depicting the inhabitants of a settlement atop a landfill on the outskirts of Tokyo. Young Roku-chan is obsessed with trams, and his story bookends this complicated collection of lives lived on the margins of society. Based on Shugoro Yamamoto’s 1962 collection of stories The Town Without Seasons—Kurosawa’s third adaptation of the novelist’s work after Sanjuro (1962) and Red Beard (1965)—the filmmaker’s most loosely woven picture to date was also the first and only release by Yonki-no-kai Productions, a collective of four directors formed to support Kurosawa’s uncharacteristically idiosyncratic vision. Dodes’ka-den was nominated at the 44th... Academy Awards in the category formerly known as Foreign Language Film, now International Feature Film, marking the tenth nomination for the country in this category.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.
1970 | 140 min. | Japan | Color | Japanese with English subtitles | Not Rated | 35mm
DIRECTED BY: Akira Kurosawa
WRITTEN BY: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto
BASED ON A NOVEL BY: Shugoro Yamamoto
WITH: Yoshitaka Zushi, Kin Sugai, Toshiyuki Tonomura, Shinsuke Minami