Take Aim at the Police Van

In the organizer's words:

13号待避線より その護送車を狙え Jûsangô taihisen yori sono gosôsha o nerae

Director: SUZUKI Seijun
1960, 79 minutes, OmeU, b/w, 35 mm

At the beginning of this twist-filled thriller, a prisoner transporter is attacked. Two prisoners die and the perpetrator escapes. Senior warden Tamon Daijirô is accused of negligent behavior and suspended from duty for six months, but he disregards this and takes up the pursuit on his own initiative.

In his investigations, Tamon tries to find out who the victims were, what relationships they had with friends and family and whether a certain system can be identified behind the murders. In the course of his tenacious investigations, he ends up in dead ends, follows up leads that turn out to be false and discovers more deaths. Mysteriously, the mysterious Yûko, whose father seems to run a brothel and is in prison, appears in all the clues he pursues.

Movie series
In search of criminals and new images - Japanese films from the 1960s

In the 1960s and 1970s, Japan was in a phase of economic, political and social upheaval, which also had a serious impact on the country's film industry. As a counter-movement to the films of the previously established master directors, works emerged that were in part radically new in their themes and aesthetics and moved beyond the existing pigeonholes.

With seven films made between 1958 and 1968, the series provides an insight into the cinema of the 1960s and presents works by five directors who were among the most important representatives of their time: Imamura Shôhei (1926-2006), Nomura Yoshitarô (1919-2005), Shindô Kaneto (1912-2012), Shinoda Masahiro (*1931) and Suzuki Seijun (1923-2017).

Three Nikkatsu action films by Suzuki Seijun, who is considered an experimental visionary in Japanese film history, can be seen. In his first color film, Imamura Shôhei dissects the archaic relationships of a village community marked by incest. Shindô Kaneto is represented with his impressive global success about the adversities of life. Finally, the crime film by Nomura Yoshitarô shows the dramatic chase after a murderer and with his film noir, Shinoda Masahiro has left a lasting mark on the yakuza thriller genre.

Price information:

Admission free