Dodes'ka-den

Dodes'ka-den (1970) is Akira Kurosawa's first color film, and you can watch it online on iFILM. It unfolds at the edge of a Tokyo garbage dump, in a shantytown where the poor scrape together a life out of almost nothing.

At its center is a disabled boy who "drives" an imaginary trolley each day, working invisible levers and yelling "do-des-ka-den" to mimic the clatter of the wheels. Around him spin other lives: a homeless father and his son sketching out a dream house they will never build, two drunks who casually swap wives, a man who buries himself in silence after his wife's betrayal, a clerk whose party for coworkers ends in a brawl. Kurosawa weaves the vignettes into a ragged mosaic of hardship and small, stubborn kindness.

He drenches the slum in feverish, almost cartoonish color — a deliberate clash between how bleak these lives are and how vivid they look. The film flopped on release and pushed Kurosawa into one of his darkest stretches, yet it was later reclaimed as one of his strangest, most personal works, and it competed for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Based on short stories by Shugoro Yamamoto. Stream Dodes'ka-den (1970) online on iFILM.