Hiroshi Shimizu: Notes of an Itinerant Director

July 19–August 28, 2024

One of the great directors of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema, Hiroshi Shimizu depicts the struggles of people on the margins with a light touch, avoiding melodrama and inflecting even the most serious stories with humor and profound humanity.

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  • Mr. Thank You

  • Children of the Beehive

  • Ornamental Hairpin

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Past Films

  • Ornamental Hairpin

    Hiroshi Shimizu
    Japan, 1941

    35mm Archival Print

    Friday, July 19 7:00 PM

    Yasujiro Ozu regular Chishu Ryu and legendary actress/director Kinuyo Tanaka star in Hiroshi Shimizu’s elegiac tale of two strangers brought together by fate at a mountain onsen resort.

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  • Mr. Thank You

    Hiroshi Shimizu
    Japan, 1936

    35mm Archival Print

    Sunday, July 21 7:00 PM

    "Mr. Thank You is the driver of a bus chugging its way through the hills and villages of rural Japan. Shooting entirely on location, [Hiroshi] Shimizu merrily tracks along the winding paths. Irresistible” (National Film Theatre, London).

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  • Forget Love for Now

    Hiroshi Shimizu
    Japan, 1937
    Saturday, July 27 7:00 PM

    A single mother turned bar hostess struggles to raise her son in the face of social condemnation and economic exploitation in this set-bound, fog-drenched noir of sinister alleyways, Art Deco nightclubs, and maternal duty.

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  • A Hero of Tokyo

    Hiroshi Shimizu
    Japan, 1935

    35mm Archival Print

    Wednesday, July 31 7:00 PM

    A woman turns to operating a hostess bar in order to save her children from poverty, only to find her secrets revealed, in Hiroshi Shimizu’s melodrama, tinged with social critique and noirish influences.

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  • Notes of an Itinerant Performer

    Hiroshi Shimizu
    Japan, 1941

    35mm Archival Print

     

    Sunday, August 4 4:30 PM

    A wandering performer is welcomed into the home of a tea merchant but must fight for the family’s business after his death, in Hiroshi Shimizu’s classic melodrama of social obligation and women’s sacrifice.

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  • Children in the Wind

    Hiroshi Shimizu
    Japan, 1937

    35mm Archival Print

    Friday, August 9 7:00 PM

    Two brothers are separated when their father is falsely arrested in one of Hiroshi Shimizu’s most beloved films, shot in a variety of outdoor locations and filled with the director’s sweetly observational approach.

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  • Four Seasons of Children: Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter

    Hiroshi Shimizu
    Japan, 1939

    35mm Archival Print

    Sunday, August 11 3:00 PM

    Two young protagonists weather the death of their father and the changes of the four seasons in Hiroshi Shimizu’s follow-up to his beloved Children in the Wind. With a lyricism that “looks forward to early Satyajit Ray” (John Gillett).

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  • Children of the Beehive

    Hiroshi Shimizu
    Japan, 1948
    Friday, August 16 7:00 PM

    A group of orphans and a returning veteran search for jobs across a scarred postwar Japan in Hiroshi Shimizu’s remarkable work of Japanese neorealism, filmed entirely on location—including in a Hiroshima still marked by the atomic bomb.

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  • Mr. Shosuke Ohara

    Hiroshi Shimizu
    Japan, 1949
    Sunday, August 18 7:00 PM

    A kindly rich man gives away his fortune to all who ask for it in this village comedy of manners and misfits. Its 1949 postwar setting provides the film a surprisingly elegiac look at how “times have changed.”

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  • Dancing Girl

    Hiroshi Shimizu
    Japan, 1957

    BAMPFA Collection

    Wednesday, August 28 7:00 PM

    1950s Japanese sex symbol Machiko Kyo stars as a young sister ready to shake up her older sibling’s safe life in the Asakusa entertainment district in Hiroshi Shimizu’s bouncy postwar melodrama of dance-hall girls, lecherous men, and women’s sacrifice.

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