In just over an hour of tautly paced, plot-filled action, Shimizu unspools the tragic generational tale of Kenichi, a boy whose backsliding father abandons him.

This devastating story of a single mother Oyuki who supports herself and her son Haruo by working at a “chabuya,” a hostess bar catering to foreigners, is set in the cosmopolitan harbor city of Yokohama.

Shimizu’s first talkie enacts another tale of fallen womanhood and migrant struggle.

Screening 5/5, Hiroshi Shimizu's beloved road movie fashions a tour of depression-era Japan that deserves mention in the company of Ford’s Stagecoach and Renoir’s The Crime of Monsieur Lange. 

In Shimizu’s most renowned and adored film in Japan, the idyllic country life of two brothers is suddenly thrown into crisis one summer when their father is wrongly arrested for embezzlement. Screens Friday, 5/10.

Shimizu's film draws on the then widely circulated story of a 17-year-old Taiwanese aboriginal girl whose patriotic zeal so gripped her that she drowned amid a storm while seeing off her Japanese teacher for the Chinese front.

Singled out by several Shimizu scholars as a masterpiece, this first part of the two-volume sequel to Children in the Wind portrays the ongoing trials of boys Zenta and Sanpei as their family once again falls on hard times. Screening 5/11.

Singled out by several Shimizu scholars as a masterpiece, this two-volume sequel to Children in the Wind portrays the ongoing trials of boys Zenta and Sanpei as their family once again falls on hard times.

Shimizu’s plaintive romance turns on the encounter between a convalescing soldier (Ozu stalwart Chishu Ryū) and a young woman (the great Kinuyo Tanaka) fleeing her sordid past at a secluded mountain spa.

This collection of vignettes set in the titular rural hilltop reformatory might be the most soberly realistic of Shimizu’s many films about children.

Shimizu’s episodic sports comedy is a favorite among film historians for its virtuoso passages of camera movement, including a sublime 40-shot march along a country road that’s pure back-and-forth axial motion.

Shimizu’s most eccentrically personal film, screening 5/12, follows a pair of blind masseuses who come across a variety of characters whose dilemmas range from tragic to comic.

Largely due to its atypical period setting in the late Meiji era and its theme of female self-sacrifice, Shimizu’s film has drawn comparison to similar works by Kenji Mizoguchi.

The most celebrated of Shimizu’s postwar films, screening 5/19, is a momentous work depicting the shattered state of reconstruction-era Japan.