SIFF Movie Club: Sansho the Bailiff
May 4, 2026
One of cinema's greatest masterpieces, Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi's empathetic examination of human resilience in the face of evil takes place in medieval Japan, where the family of an exiled nobleman are left to fend for themselves and become wrenched apart by vicious slave traders.
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Monday, May 4, 2026
Alongside his countrymen Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi completes the triumvirate of Japanese cinema’s master practitioners. His prodigious capacity for empathy, uncompromising moral clarity, and elegant visuals all combine beautifully in his masterpiece, Sansho the Bailiff. Set in eleventh-century Japan, the film begins when a virtuous governor disobeys the reigning feudal lord by shielding the local peasantry from a military draft, an act for which he is exiled. Several years later, his wife and two children, Zushiō and Anju, journey to reunite with him, but fall victim to slave traders, who force the mother into prostitution and sell the children into slavery on a manorial estate, overseen by eponymous Sansho. Conditions on the estate are brutal and dehumanizing, yet as Anju grows into adulthood, she holds onto her father’s key teaching “without mercy, man is like a beast.” Her brother, however, descends into the estate’s pervasive barbarity, becoming one of its most sadistic overseers. But when Anju, through an act of supreme sacrifice, inspires him to escape, Zushiō embarks upon a bittersweet redemptive path through triumph and tragedy that culminates, at film’s end, in a heartrending scene of sublime beauty.
- Original Language Title: Sanshô dayû
- Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
- Principal Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyôko Kagawa, Eitarô Shindô, Akitake Kôno
- Country: Japan
- Year: 1954
- Running Time: 126 min.
- Producer: Masaichi Nagata
- Screenplay: Fuji Yahiro, Yoshikata Yoda, Ogai Mori
- Cinematographers: Kazuo Miyagawa
- Editors: Mitsuzô Miyata
- Music: Fumio Hayasaka, Kinshichi Kodera, Tamekichi Mochizuki
- Language: Japanese
- Has Subtitles: Yes
- US Distributor: Janus Films