Following the UK Premiere of Forever A Woman as part of Cinema Rediscovered 2022, we are excited to be screening new 4K restorations of the films from the often-overlooked Japanese auteur Kinuyo Tanaka.

A pioneering woman in a studio system of the 1950s that actively discouraged female directors, Tanaka made six ground-breaking features over the course of a decade, dismissing the passivity assigned to most female protagonists of the era and creating a small, radical oeuvre of progressive heroines.

Though Tanaka has long been renowned as an iconic actor, having starred in films by directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Mikio Naruse, her own work as a filmmaker has been conspicuously absent from many studies of Japanese cinema. All of the six films by Tanaka - having rarely been screened outside of Japan - have been carefully restored in 4K for this retrospective, and make up one of the very first seasons ever to present Tanaka's directorial work in its entirety

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