Akira Kurosawa-Waga seishun ni kuinashi ('No Regrets for Our Youth') (1946)

In Akira Kurosawa's first film after the end of World War II, future beloved Ozu regular Setsuko Hara gives an astonishing performance as Yukie, the only female protagonist in Kurosawa's body of work and one of his strongest heroes. Transforming herself from genteel bourgeois daughter to independent social activist, Yukie traverses a tumultuous decade in Japanese history. Criterion




Yukie, the well-bred daughter of a university professor, is shocked when her father is relieved of his post for his political teachings, and even more so when her lover, one of her father's students, is arrested, then executed as a spy. She decides to leave Kyoto to live with the boy's parents in their peasant village. But life still has many lessons for her..... (http://imdb.com/title/tt0039090/plotsummary)




One of the more obscure early finds in master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's oeuvre, this earnest 1946 film explores the nature of politics and passion. The plot centers around the daughter (Setsuko Hara) of an academic as she is thrust into the political and social turmoil of the years leading into the Second World War. As the fascists rise to power she sees her father stripped of his teaching position and her young lover arrested and executed as her other love interest goes to work for the state.




The girl must try to make sense of the tumultuous world around her as she struggles to find her own identity and convictions. The film features some trademark visual sequences of the chaos that consumed pre-war Japan, including riots and military occupation. Director Kurosawa maintains a studied and deliberate pace as he examines the pull of the girl between her romantic impulses and her sense of right and wrong. A powerful story of loss, redemption and empowerment, No Regrets for Our Youth is a prime opportunity to see one of the cinema's masters at work. (--Robert Lane - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)