Die birmanische Harfe

In the organizer's words:

ビルマの竪琴 Biruma no tategoto

Director: ICHIKAWA Kon
1985, 133 minutes, OVD, 16 mm

With this remake of his 1956 work of the same name, director Ichikawa Kon has created a moving anti-war film.

In the summer of 1945, a group of Japanese soldiers are on the run from Burma to Thailand. The vanguard is Mizushima, who plays an excellent Burmese harp and shows his comrades the way with various melodies in the garb of the locals. After the end of the war, he gets caught up in bloody battles and is considered missing. But he lives and from then on follows a path as a Buddhist monk, converted by the painful sight of the dead that the war has claimed.

The music by composer and conductor Yamamoto Naozumi (1932- 2002) was nominated in the "Best Music" category at the Japanese Academy Awards in 1986.

Film series
The value of remembering
Japanese films against forgetting

In the current time of change, remembering and commemorating the past is more important than ever. In 2024, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Japanese anti-nuclear weapons organization "Nihon Hidankyo", a grassroots movement of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The Norwegian Nobel Committee's citation states that the group, founded in 1956, was awarded the Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through testimony that nuclear weapons should never be used again.

Japanese film history also addresses the suffering and hardships that people had to contend with in connection with the war. The film series shows works by renowned directors that focus on the fate of individual people.

It begins with a family story based on the notes of a doctor(Kono ko o nokoshite). Music plays an important role in a Japanese soldier's fight for survival (Biruma no tategoto) and on an island, a teacher cares for her pupils(Nijûshi no hitomi). A docudrama depicts true events about a traveling theater group (Sakuratai chiru), followed by the story of a girl who folds cranes in the face of death(Senbazuru). A film about the skull of a kamikaze pilot(Fûon) and a production inspired by the historical figure Onoda Hirô(ONODA, Ichimanya o koete) conclude the program.

Price information:

Admission free