Movies: Kinuyo Tanaka

Utamaro, a great artist, lives to create portraits of beautiful women, and the brothels of Tokyo provide his models. A world of passion swirls around him, as the women in his life vie for lovers. And, occasionally, his art gets him into trouble....

Aspiring to an easy job as personal physician to a wealthy family, Noboru Yasumoto is disappointed when his first post after medical school takes him to a small country clinic under the gruff doctor Red Beard. Yasumoto rebels in numerous ways, but Re...

In medieval Japan, a woman and her children journey to find the family's patriarch, who was exiled years earlier....

In 16th century Japan, peasants Genjuro and Tobei sell their earthenware pots to a group of soldiers in a nearby village, in defiance of a local sage's warning against seeking to profit from warfare. Genjuro's pursuit of both riches and the mysteriou...

The stage director Shimamura, who is bringing western theatre to Japan, falls in love with the outspoken actress Sumako Matsui, and leaves his family to be with her, while trying to keep his Art Theatre solvent....

In Edo Period Japan, a noblewoman's banishment for her love affair with a lowly page signals the beginning of her inexorable fall....

In Kabuki style, the film tells the story of a remote mountain village where the scarcity of food leads to a voluntary but socially-enforced policy in which relatives carry 70-year-old family members up Narayama mountain to die. Granny Orin is approa...

Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man, shares her family life with her budding vocation as a poet. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides with her divorce and her breast cancer diagnosis. In the last stage of...

The legend of the birth of Shintoism. In Fourth Century Japan, the Emperor's son Ouso expects to succeed his father on the throne, but Otomo, the Emperor's vassal, prefers Ouso's stepbrother, and conspires to have Ouso die on a dangerous mission he h...

Wataru Hirayama's outwardly liberal views on marriage are severely tested when his daughter declares that she is in love with a musician and is adamant to live life her own way, instead of agreeing to an arranged marriage. Outwitted by his female rel...

A young journalist interviews an elderly woman about being forced into prostitution in Borneo at a brothel called Sandakan No. 8....

This documentary composed of numerous testimonies and archives, filmed in Japan highlights the extraordinary career of the actress-director Kinuyo Tanaka and her singular ambition to impose a female point of view on cinema, reflecting her own vision ...

Otsuta is running the geisha house Tsuta in Tokyo. Her business is heavily in debt. Her daughter Katsuyo doesn't see any future in her mother's trade in the late days of Geisha. But Otsuta will not give up. This film portraits the day time life of ge...

The story of an orphan girl, brought up in naive, rustic innocence by an elderly relative, who is suddenly exposed to the brutality, greed and deceptiveness of the outside world when her grandmother dies....

Though plagued by ill health all his life, a young Japanese man is obligated to fulfill his family's longstanding military tradition....

A sad and troubled man finds a new job five years after the end of WWII, where he writes love letters for other people....

After her mother runs away from home, Tomoko is raised to be a geisha. One day Tomoko meets her mother in a red-light district in Tokyo and her life deeply gets in trouble....

Yukiko's fiance learns her mother runs a geisha house and ends their engagement. She despises what her mother does until one of her clients shows interest and starts to woo her....

Pu Zhe, the younger brother of the Emperor of Manchukuo, marries Ryuko the daughter of an aristocratic family. To the surprise of all, a deep love between Pu Zhe and Ryuko develops and is put to the test when Japan loses the war....

A teenaged girl witnesses her widowed mother's attempt to sustain her family....