The Makioka Sisters (film screening)

The Makioka Sisters
細雪

Tuesday, April 30, 6:00PM (ET)

Doors open 5:00PM | Film Screening | In-Person | JFT Event Hall

Directed by KON Ichikawa • 1983 • Drama / Romance • 140 minutes • Presented in Japanese with English subtitles • Trailer

“The Makioka Sisters“ film screening on April 30 is now fully booked and registration is closed. There will be no waiting list.  However, on the day of the event, we will have an in-person waiting line starting 60 minutes before the event on a first-come, first-served basis for cancelled seats. We cannot guarantee your admittance, but if you are willing to take a chance, please join the line.

This lyrical adaptation of the beloved novel by TANIZAKI Junichiro was a late-career triumph for director ICHIKAWA Kon. Structured around the changing of the seasons, The Makioka Sisters (細雪 / Sasame-yuki) follows the lives of four siblings who have taken on their family’s kimono manufacturing business, in the years leading up to the Pacific War. The two oldest have been married for some time, but according to tradition, the rebellious youngest sister cannot wed until the third, conservative and terribly shy, finds a husband. This graceful study of a family at a turning point in history is a poignant evocation of changing times and fading customs, shot in rich, vivid colors.
—The Criterion Channel

Co-presented with the Consulate-General of Japan in Toronto, in celebration of springtime and cherry blossom season.

Free admission. Register below.

Director Profile:

Born in 1915, ICHIKAWA Kon was a world-renowned Japanese film director who was credited with introducing Western-style comedy to Japan in the 1950s. Later in his career, Ichikawa’s work became concerned with more-serious subjects such as antiwar sentiment.

Ichikawa graduated from the Ichioka Commercial School in Ōsaka. He made his first motion picture, Musume Dojo-ji (The Girl at Dojo Temple), a puppet drama based on a traditional Kabuki play, in 1946 for the Shintōhō Motion Picture Company. Sambyaku rokujūgo ya (1948; Three Hundred and Sixty-five Nights) was his first big box-office success. He collaborated with his wife, WADA Natto, a screenwriter, on the screenplays for many of his early films.

In the 1950s, Ichikawa and Wada developed the genre of the verbally witty comedy in Japan in such films as Ashi ni sawatta onna (1953; The Woman Who Touched the Legs), a remake of an earlier silent comedy, and Pū-san (1953; Mr. Pū). Two of Ichikawa’s later features, Biruma no tategoto (1956; The Burmese Harp) and Nobi (1959; Fires on the Plain), are strong antiwar statements. Of the films that followed, Kagi (1959; Odd Obsession), Yukinojō henge (1963; An Actor’s Revenge), and Matatabi (1973; The Wanderers) are notable for Ichikawa’s delicate treatment of the material and the strikingly beautiful visual composition of each scene.

One of his greatest achievements was the documentary Tōkyō Orimpikku (1965; Tokyo Olympiad), in which he emphasized the attitudes and responses of the spectators and competitors over the outcome of the events. His later work included a television serialization of The Tale of Genji and a number of popular suspense melodramas.