Friday | May 1, 2009 7:00 pm

Sansho the Bailiff
(Sansho dayu)

Screening on Film

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.
With Eitaro Shindo, Kinuyo Tanaka.
Japan, 1954, 35mm, black & white, 120 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: Janus Films

An intensely lyrical, uncompromising study of tragedy and psychic degradation, Sansho the Bailiff is among Mizoguchi’s great masterpieces. The story, set in eleventh-century Japan, concerns a mother and her two children, who are kidnapped and sold into slavery. After a decade of subjugation the son sets out about deposing the cruel bailiff who brought tragedy upon his family.