Film screening: Mother (Okaasan)

Details and tickets purchase information: 
https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/mother-2025-07
Harvard students admitted free to regularly priced shows.

Directed by Naruse Mikio. 
With Tanaka Kinuyo, Kagawa Kyoko, Okada Eiji
Japan, 1952, 35mm, b/w, 98 min. 
Japanese with English subtitles

Naruse's first film made after the American occupation, Mother bolstered the consensus that the director had returned to form after a wartime slump, placing seventh in the Kinema Junpo poll and earning the praise of Cahiers du Cinemacritics André Bazin and Alain Resnais. The titular mother Masako (Tanaka Kinuyo) is a monument of maternal love venerated by her eldest daughter Toshiko (Kagawa Kyoko). Using as its source material a contest-winning essay by a child, the film deconstructs its own saccharine tone as Toshiko crosses from childhood into adulthood by opening her eyes to the fact that Masako is more than her sacrifices. – Kelley Dong


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