Arigato-san (1936) *****

People like me and Ozu get films made by hard work, but Shimizu is a genius... - Kenji Mizoguchi

A unique masterpiece of the Japanese cinema. Directed by Hiroshi Shimizu, it's a chronicle of a bus ride across a long mountain road. The delicate narrative exquisitely threads together various journeys taken by a disparate group of people all travelling from one place to another for various reasons with the small interjections of other passersby on the roadside. Shimizu wrote the script based on Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata's novel.