Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Akira Kurosawa’s portrait of the all-female volunteer workers at an optics factory during World War II, shot on location at the Nippon Kogaku factory in Hiratsuka, was created with a definite patriotic agenda. Yet thanks to the director’s groundbreaking semidocumentary approach to the material, The Most Beautiful is not merely nationalist propaganda, but a revealing look at Japanese women of the era that anticipates the aesthetics of Japanese cinema’s postwar social realism.

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