Ozu Yasujirō’s celebrated family drama, Tokyo monogatari/Tokyo Story (1953), is universally acknowledged as one of the most significant Japanese films ever made, and regularly cited as one of the greatest films of all time in polls of leading critics and filmmakers around the world.

Telling the moving story of an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children, the film contrasts the behaviour of their children, who are too busy to pay their parents much attention, and their widowed daughter-in-law who treats them with hospitable kindness. In its complex portrait of human motivation and lively sense of social space, it offers a profound and poignant insight into the generational shifts of postwar Japan.

Professor Alastair Phillips (University of Warwick), author of a new BFI Film Classic on Tokyo Story (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), will give an extended illustrated talk on the film. The presentation will combine a close analysis of the film’s key locations – the city of Tokyo and the town of Onomichi – with discussion of its representation of Japanese society at a time of great cultural change. Drawing upon Japanese and English language sources, he will also situate Tokyo Story within various contemporary critical and industrial contexts and examine the multiple international dimensions of the film’s long after-life to understand its enormous contribution to global film culture.

A discount code will be provided for attendees of this event.

About the contributors

Alastair Phillips

Alastair Phillips is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the co-editor (with Hideaki Fujiki) of The Japanese Cinema Book (BFI, 2020) and Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts (2007) (with Julian Stringer).