kaneto shindo

Born on April 22, 1912 in Hiroshima, Kaneto Shindo was the youngest of four children of a landowner who worked as a moneylender until he went bankrupt. After the financial ruin and the unfortunate death of his mother when he was 10 years old, the family broke up. He ends up living with one of his brothers in Tokyo, when he is dazzled by a Japanese film titled Bangaku No Issho , by Sadao Yamanaka, which makes him dream of becoming a filmmaker.

He decides to move to Kyoto where he looks for a job at the Shinko Kinema production company, where they think he is too short to be part of the lighting department, and ends up in production, where he works hard because although eleven people were theoretically part of the section, in reality nine they were part of the company baseball team.

At that time, Shindo learned that a script was written before every movie, because the company recycled old scripts. After reading many, he began to write multiple scripts himself that his friends read to give him their opinion. In 1935, Shinko Kinema moved to Tokyo, and Shindo was promoted to the art direction department, in the position of one of the employees who did not want to change cities after the company’s departure.

Since the late 1930s, he has been an assistant to the great filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi , with whom he filmed The Forty-Seven Ronin , among others . “The most important thing I learned from him was never to give up. He made more than eighty films, and let’s not kid ourselves, most of them are conventional and even boring. But without his failures we wouldn’t have masterpieces like Tales of the Pale Moon ,” he commented. shindo.

When Japan was involved in World War II, he was drafted into the Navy, but was assigned to a group dedicated to cleaning buildings. He ended up in a prison camp, although after the war he traded his uniform for cigarettes.

Back at the studio, he finds the facilities deserted and while he waits for his superiors to return, he spends many days reading the scripts that had survived the war. Soon after, he began writing projects for director Kozaburo Yoshimura , with whom he achieved success with Ajo-ke no butokai .

Yoshimura ended up forming his own production company with Shindo, with which the latter began his directing career with Aisai monogatari , a romantic drama with many autobiographical elements. Although a few years before he had married Takako Kuji, Shindo falls in love with the protagonist, Nobuko Otowa , for which he leaves his wife and begins a long relationship with the interpreter.

Internationally, Shindo makes his name with The Children of Hiroshima , where Otowa plays a teacher who returns to the city four years after the atomic bomb in search of a former student who has survived. She participated in the official section of the Cannes film festival. Her biggest hit was The Naked Island , where she described without dialogue the struggle for survival of a humble family on a small island.

The excellent Oninaba , set in medieval Japan, where the mother and wife of a warrior try to stay alive while waiting for his return, also had international circulation. He turned to horror movies with El gato negro (1968) , where two ghostly women lure lone samurai into their home with evil intentions.

He continued directing numerous tapes until he reached an advanced age. He also wrote for other filmmakers, as in the case of Hachiko monogatari , a true story of a prodigious dog, which led to an American remake, Always by your side. Hachiko , which starred Richard Gere . His last work dates from 2010, Ichimai no hagaki , where a World War II soldier receives a card from a comrade warning him that he is sure he will die in combat. It won the Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo Film Festival.