A biting portrait of the world of classical Japanese dance: an ambitious young woman (Wakao Ayako) shoves aside her mentor (Kyo Machiko) on her way to the top.
Kazuo Miyagawa’s prizewinning black-and-white cinematography draws out the moral shadings of Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s 1952 novel Thousand Cranes, a quietly devastating story of a young man, orphaned during the war, who stumbles into a passionate yet tragic relationship with his late father’s mistress and her daughter.
