Fri, August 4 / 7pm
Dir. Suzuki Seijun
1956, Japan, 79 min
Japanese with English subtitles
A notorious murderer Oba escapes from jail. Hayasaki, the Oba’s right hand, tries to get the money by manipulating the horse racing to send Oba to Hong Kong. But Oba has a plan to avenge the police officer who arrested him and to rob a bank again.
Plays with
Love Letter
Dir. Suzuki Seijun
1959, Japan, 40 min
Japanese with English subtitles
A nightclub manager is in love with his pianist. However, she has a ranger boyfriend who’s been permanently stationed in the mountain wilderness. Their only communication is by letter. As time passes the correspondence slows to a trickle. Then nothing. The manager persuades the girl to visit the boy. She does, but she’s totally unprepared for her bizarre discovery.
The Japan Foundation, Toronto is proud to celebrate the centennial of legendary Japanese filmmaker, Suzuki Seijun, with a Canada-wide retrospective tour of his prolific body of work. Starting from April through to September, cinematheques from across the country will be participating in the retrospective with rare screenings of Suzuki’s films from his five-decade-long career, all in glorious 35mm print!
All rare 35mm prints were imported from the Film Library of the Japan Foundation’s headquarters in Tokyo.
Touring program curated by Dr. William Carroll, the author of Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema and Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta.
