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An Inn in Tokyo
(Tokyo no Yado)

Live Musical Accompaniment
Screening on Film
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu.
With Takeshi Sakamoto, Yoshiko Okada, Choko Iida.
Japan, 1935, 35mm, black & white, silent, 82 min.

Often compared to the later neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief, An Inn in Tokyo chronicles three days in the life of an unemployed factory worker who wanders through Tokyo’s industrial hinterland with his two sons, looking for work. When he attempts to help a woman in financial distress, he turns to theft. In the film’s most famous sequence, the starving family has an imaginary picnic in the midst of a bleak landscape of smokestacks. David Bordwell suggests that in its rigorous visual patterning and plaintive themes, “An Inn in Tokyo constitutes a summary of Ozu’s silent work.”

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