Film archive, 2025

The Ozu Diaries

小津ダイアリー

Director Daniel RAIM

1Festival entries

★Avg. rating

The Ozu Diaries is a documentary about the life and cinematic world of Japanese master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. Daniel Raim, who has created around 30 documentaries on great filmmakers for The Criterion Collection and Criterion Channel, explores Ozu’s inner world and artistic roots using rare materials provided by Ozu’s family and the Shochiku Studio archives, such as diaries, notebooks, letters, drawings, photographs, and home movies. Along with Ozu’s own words, the voices of his contemporaries and great directors—including Kyoko Kagawa, Wim Wenders, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Luc Dardenne—are added. The film goes beyond a simple biographical recounting, evolving into a meditation on the question, “What is cinema?” It is an attempt to sit alongside Ozu across time, to understand his life and perspective, serving as both an intimate record seeking the essence of cinema and a beautiful tribute to Ozu.