Kisses

Masumura’s stripped-back youth-centred debut is a startlingly direct, nuanced and melancholy exploration of Japan’s alienated post-war generation, with a young man and woman (Hiroshi Kawaguchi and Hitomi Nozoe) meeting cute while visiting their respective fathers at the same prison. An important precursor to the Japanese New Wave, the film’s free-roaming style, relative lightness and penetrating social critique led then-critic Nagisa Oshima to declare that “a powerful irresistible force has arrived in Japanese Cinema”.