Details and tickets purchase information: 
https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/three-sisters-with-maiden-hearts-2025-08
Harvard students admitted free to regularly priced shows.

Directed by Naruse Mikio.
With Hosokawa Chikako, Tsutsumi Masako, Umezono Ryuko
Japan, 1935, 35mm, b/w, 75 min. 
Japanese with English subtitles

Naruse’s first venture after departing Shochiku, Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts is also his inaugural sound film. Made in 1935, this sororal melodrama is adapted from Nobel-winner Kawabata Yasunari’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa(1930), a nocturnal, grimy X-ray of what was then downtown Tokyo’s most decadent and transgressive district. The titular sisters—Chieko, Osome and O-Ren—navigate Asakusa’s seedy nightlife in different ways: one is a shamisen player, the other a burlesque club dancer, while the third spends too much time with racketeers and gangsters. Some of the film’s (non-)actors are real-life revue stars; but most had little to no theatrical training. Naruse experiments with sound and image more than his studio contemporaries, employing two uncharacteristic techniques he would later rarely return to: voiceover narration and flashbacks (at least one of which is itself within a flashback). Three Sisters sees Naruse retaining the hyper-realist yet energetic editing of his silent-era opus, even as he is still finding his bearings at a new production company and with a new technology. Incidental, ambient noise plays a crucial role in the film’s sonorization of the city, as does pre-recorded music—including one remarkable (and hilarious) appearance of the gramophone. – Nace Zavrl

Harvard Film Archive special film series FLOATING CLOUDS… THE CINEMA OF NARUSE MIKIO co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute