Marking Yasujiro Ozu's 120th birthday, film archives around the world are honoring the Japanese master with retrospectives of his oevre. Wall Street Journal highlighted BAMPFA's retrospective, Yasujiro Ozu: The Elegance of Simplicity.

"The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Calif., is about to begin its program of 19 pictures—a well-chosen selection of silent and sound movies, black-and-white and color—running Dec. 3 through Feb. 25, 2024, just in time for the milestone birthday on Dec. 12, which also happens to be, neatly, the 60th anniversary of Ozu’s death.

"Titled 'Yasujiro Ozu: The Elegance of Simplicity,' it touches on the many facets of a filmmaker even his admirers can sometimes reduce to a series of visual and thematic tropes, missing much of the subtlety and complex interplay that exists within his oeuvre. But seeing his pictures as a group reminds us that rather than being lazy by revisiting the same situations and reusing many of the same actors to play similar roles (Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, Haruko Sugimura, among a host of others), Ozu was instead delving deeply into the commonalities of being human. His films are, at their core, calls for acceptance, compassion and even forgiveness—their repeated beats not empty repetition but amplifications."

Read the full article on Wall Street Journal, and explore our film series Yasujiro Ozu: The Elegance of Simplicity.