David Farnor | On 04, May 2020

BFI Player is launching a mammoth six-month season, starting this May, celebrating 100 years of Japanese cinema.

Simply called BFI Japan, the season will originally scheduled to run in venues across the UK, but with cinemas still closed amid the coronavirus lockdown, the season is taking to the web instead – with plans to open it in cinemas later this year. Running on BFI Player from May to October 2020, the season will feature the great classics of Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Mikio Naruse, the samurai swordsmen of Akira Kurosawa and the pioneering women of the Golden Age like Kinuyo Tanaka. There will be striking films by post-war New Wave directors like Nagisa Oshima, vivid visions of Anime masters such as Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon, and the J-horror netherworlds created by filmmakers like Hideo Nakata. The season will also celebrate contemporary visionaries such as Takashi Miike, Takeshi Kitano and Naomi Kawase, as well as spotlight the next generation of creatives making waves in Japan, with the chance to see 21st century films which are yet to be made available in the UK. The season will also draw on the BFI National Archive’s significant collection of early films of Japan dating back to 1894, including travelogues, home movies and newsreels, offering audiences a rare chance to see how European and Japanese filmmakers captured life in Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Heather Stewart, BFI Creative Director, says: “Japan has one of the richest cinematic traditions in the world, acclaimed for fusing the finest craftsmanship with an audacious and experimental spirit, and distinctive social and cultural histories with popular forms and genres. The BFI has a long term special relationship with Japanese cinema: we opened the very first BFI London Film Festival in 1957 with Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and, in the same year, presented a landmark celebration of Japanese film at the National Film Theatre (now BFI Southbank). The BFI London Film Festival has since consistently introduced UK audiences to new Japanese filmmaking talent, and we have presented retrospectives at BFI Southbank of the work of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Oshima, Ichikawa, Ozu and Kore-eda, as well as a hugely popular celebration of Women in Japanese Melodrama.”

The BFI Player collections will be broken down into months as follows: Akira Kurosawa (May), Classics (May), Yasujirō Ozu (June), Independence (June), Cult (July), Anime (July), 21st Century (September) and J-Horror (October). A new free collection will also be added to BFI Player called Early Films of Japan (1894-1914), featuring rare material from the BFI National Archive’s significant collection of early films of Japan.

BFI Japan will be live from Monday 11th May. Alongside the BFI Player titles will be a string of digital events on YouTube, yet to be confirmed.

Kurosawa Collection – 11th May

A major new season from the BFI launches on BFI Player with a collection of 22 films by master director Akira Kurosawa, the first Japanese filmmaker to achieve an international reputation, whose influence on global cinema, from Westerns to Star Wars cannot be overstated. The films included are:

Seven Samurai (1954)
Throne Of Blood (1957)
Yojimbo (1961)
Sanjuro (1962)
Rashomon (1950)
The Men Who Tread On The Tiger’s Tail (1945)
Drunken Angel (1948)
Stray Dog (1949)
Ikiru (1952)
The Hidden Fortress (1958)
The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Red Beard (1965)
Ran (1985)
Sanshiro Sugata (1943)
Sanshiro Sugata Part Two (1945)
The Most Beautiful (1944)
No Regrets For Our Youth (1946)
One Wonderful Sunday (1947)
I Live In Fear (1955)
The Lower Depths (1957)
High And Low (1963)
Dodes’ka-den (1970)

Japan Classics Collection – 11th May

An essential introduction to great works of 20th Century Japanese cinema., with more to be added at a later date:

Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse, 1954)
Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)
When A Woman Ascends The Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)
Onibaba (Kaneto Shindô, 1964)
Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964)
Hana-bi (Takeshi Kitano, 1997)
Black Rain (Shohei Imamura, 1989)
Branded To Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967)
Woman Of The Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)
After Life (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998)
Youth Of The Beast (Seijun Suzuki, 1963)
Gate Of Hell (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1953)
Cruel Story Of Youth (Nagisa Ôshima, 1960)

Ozu – 5th June

Famed for his distinctive technical and visual style, and often cited as cinema’s greatest director, Yasujirô Ozu’s films use minimalist storytelling and an emphasis on character to paint a portrait of family life and the relationships between the generations. The films included are:

I Was Born, But… (1932)
The Flavour Of Green Tea Over Rice (1952)
Tokyo Story (1953)
Late Autumn (1960)
Early Summer (1951)
Good Morning (1959)
An Autumn Afternoon (1962)
Equinox Flower (1958)
Late Spring (1949)
Walk Cheerfully (1930)
I Flunked, But… (1930)
Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? (1932)
Early Spring (1956)
That Night’s Wife (1930)
The Lady and the Beard (1931)
A Mother Should Be Loved (1934)
The Only Son (1936)
What Did the Lady Forget? (1937)
There Was a Father (1942)
A Hen in the Wind (1948)
Dragnet Girl (1933)
Days Of Youth (1929)
Woman Of Tokyo (1933)
Tokyo Twilight (1957)
Brothers And Sisters Of The Toda Family (1941)

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