Kon Ichikawa

Various tales in the lives of Tokyo slum dwellers, including a mentally deficient young man obsessed with driving his own commuter trolley.

A conscience-driven Japanese soldier traumatized by the events of WWII adopts the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk.

In the closing days of WWII, remnants of the Japanese army in Leyte are abandoned by their command and face certain death by starvation.

Yukinojo, a Kabuki actor, seeks revenge by destroying the three men who caused the deaths of his parents. Also involved are the daughter of one of Yukinojo's targets, two master thieves, and a swordsman who himself is out to kill ...

The adventures of a brave young boy who travels from planet to planet in a determined quest to avenge his mother's death.

Kon Ichikawa examines the beauty and rich drama on display at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, creating a record of observations that range from the expansive to the intimate.

The orphaned Makioka sisters look for a husband for their third sister, Yukiko, as the rebellious youngest sister, Taeko, is kept waiting her turn.

A hustler who gets in trouble with a gang boss in the port town of Sukago agrees to make good with the don by putting him in contact with a mysterious hitman -- an assassin the hustler has no idea how to contact. Instead, he hires...

When a tycoon passes away, he unexpectedly leaves the family fortune to outsider Tamayo on the condition that she marries one of the grandsons, pitting blood against blood.

Eight film artists from different countries are given carte blanche to make a collection of short documentaries on the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, offering unexpected, original and often humorous perspectives.

Based on a centuries-old traditional Japanese fairy tale, a country couple finds a baby girl in some bamboo and raises her as their own daughter. Not the same as the original tale, though, in which the girl was a fairy from the mo...

A group of disgraced samurai plan a decade long revenge against a corrupt lord.

Kenichi Horie is determined to challenge his family, the law and the nature crossing the Pacific to America in a small sailboat. Despite his careful planning many unforeseen events will test his determination.

At the end of Meiji era a young student befriend an older man who as a proof of trust but also as a kind of exorcism entrust him his secret, a story about jealousy, betrayal, shame and guilt.

Based on renowned Japanese writer Natsume Soseki's same-titled short story collection, Ten Nights of Dreams brings ten fantastical dream sequences to film with great visual and psychological panache. Representing the combined effo...

A web of deceit, adultery and greed manifests in Kon Ichikawa's remake of his own 1976 hit about a murder investigation that reveals years of hidden skeletons and a shocking family secret.

Kôsuke Kindaichi, a somewhat peculiar private detective, visits a remote town. He meets a police detective and they start to investigate an old unsolved murder. Then some murders happen. Kindaichi must find out about the past in o...

The cat of the title roams around the house of a poor schoolteacher in the late 19th century, observing the goings-on of the teacher and his neighbors.

A scruffy detective investigates the murders of three sisters on a small Japanese island in 1946.

A young man struggles to come to terms with his true identity in a remote caste-based village in early 20th century Japan.

Follows the fluctuating fortunes of three wanderers who travel through feudal Japan selling their services to whichever lord will fill their rice bowls.

In a remake of a well-known Japanese mystery, a man in Kobe does not have a family. He receives a visitor who is a researcher one day who has noticed that the man has a well-off family in Okayama. This village is called Yatsuhakam...

Koto is a 1980 film directed by Kon Ichikawa starring Momoe Yamaguchi and Tomokazu Miura in an adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata's story The Old Capital.

For his 1st color film, Ichikawa did an Edo era story of two geishas scheming against each other for control of the Nihonbashi bridge area, and vying for the affections of a young doctor.

A dark satire of a contemporary Japan still exhausted from the aftermath of war, hunger, poverty and unemployment. And just as its people are recovering, there is a threat during these Cold War years of renewed militarism and rear...