Twenty-Four Eyes

Takamine Hideko stars as a new teacher assigned in 1928 to a remote town on Shodo Island in the Inland Sea, where she has a class of 12 first-year students (the twenty-four eyes of the title). The film follows their lives through the rise of militarism in the 1930s and the war to the years following defeat. Kinoshita was never a director to stint on emotion in his films, but partly thanks to a controlled and nuanced performance by Takamine, this film rises above sentimentality to become something enduring. Special note must be made of the role of children's songs in this film, which is simply magical.