Movies: Ranko Sawa

Directed by Yasujirô Shimazu....

In Depression-era Tokyo, the life of a single mother and her young son are disrupted by the return of her ex-husband, who fathered the child and walked out on her years earlier....

Set in the port city of Yokohama, two girls, Sunako and Dora who attend a Christian school, pledge to be friends. But when a youth named Henry appears on his motorcycle and offers to take Sunako for a ride, we know that this friendship won't last and...

The Japanese equivalent of penny dreadfuls glorifying Jesse James, A Diary of Chuji’s Travels gives a unique gloss to the tale of Chuji Kunisada, the legendary bakuto (or gambler, the precursors to modern-day yakuza). One of the two remaining segment...

The Morning Sun Shines is a fiction-documentary film by Kenji Mizoguchi and Seiichi Ina. The film is a combination of a drama about a reporter, and documentary footage about newspaper production. Only 25 minutes of footage has survived....

A romantic melodrama about the shifting relationship between Ryosuke and Miki as their precarious employment and social circumstances shift around them....

Japanese domestic drama....

Early Japanese sound film, a remake of Josef von Sternberg’s DOCKS OF NEW YORK set in Yokohama....