Contacts & Festivals

THE OZU DIARIES, from Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Daniel Raim, offers both an intimate biography and revelatory portrait of prolific Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, one of cinema’s most original and enduring auteurs. Drawing from a treasure trove of archival materials — journals, notebooks, correspondence, photographs, interviews and unseen home movies — the film opens a rare window into Ozu’s inner world and artistic process. With Ozu’s own words as guide, and enriched by reflections from filmmakers Wim Wenders, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Tsai Ming-liang, Luc Dardenne and others, Raim traces how Ozu’s personal life informed his work, creating cinematic masterpieces such as LATE SPRING, TOKYO STORY and AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON to name a few. His precise, deceptively simple stories and signature visual style became a vehicle for poetic, humanist explorations of family, love and impermanence. Deeply rooted in Japanese culture yet universally resonant, Ozu’s work continues to shape our understanding of cinema’s possibilities.

Director's Statement: Ozu's films didn't come easily to me at first. But his poetic portraits of family life and loneliness lingered. An Autumn Afternoon became the gateway, not through plot or drama, but through presence. As Kiyoshi Kurosawa says in this documentary, "Watching Ozu for the first time, I felt I was glimpsing the very secret of cinema itself." In 2017, while making a short film for The Criterion Collection titled In Search of Ozu, I sensed a deeper story waiting to be told: the human being behind the films. The most challenging part was confronting Ozu's wartime experience. His diaries from that period and postwar interviews reveal a rupture - a profound loss. As Masasumi Tanaka wrote, "Ozu survived the war. But we cannot deny that his humanity was in crisis." And yet, in the decades that followed, he created some of the most tender, humorous, formally playful, and emotionally resonant films in cinema. This documentary is told largely in Ozu's own words. It's an attempt to sit with him across time - to understand his pain, his joy, his contradictions, and his singular way of seeing the world.

Written, Directed & Edited by: Daniel Raim

Produced by: Yuki Machida, Daniel Raim

Director of Photography: Koichi Furuya

Original Music: Dave Lebolt

Executive Producers: Matthew & Natalie Bernstein, Hiromi Fujii, Charlie Tabesh, Eric Nyari

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Wim Wenders, Luc Dardenne, Isao Shirosawa, Michiko Yamanouchi, Tsai Ming-liang, Kyoko Kagawa, Akiko Ozu, Shizuo Yamanouchi

Yasujiro Ozu – Koi Ohori

Shiro Kido & others – Rin Takagi

Kinuyo Tanaka & Asae Ozu – Kie Nakai

Yukiko Wachi, Kazuhiro Odashima, Hidenori Okada

With support from Kawakita Memorial Film Institute, Kamakura Museum of Literature, National Film Archive of Japan

Turner Classic Movies (TCM)

Shochiku

Office OZU

Ozu and Noda photo credit: © 2025 Adama Films; photo: Shochiku Co. Ltd.