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Sansho the Baliff
(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.

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 who sets off with her two children in search of her exiled husband. When the three are kidnapped, the mother is sent to become a courtesan, and the children are sold into slavery to the cruel Sansho of the title. After a decade of subjugation and tragedy, the son, spiritually restored by a Buddhist monk, sets out to avenge his family’s sufferings by aiding humanity.

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