Boy

Boy (少年, 1969) is a Japanese crime drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Nagisa Oshima. Ten-year-old Toshio travels Japan with his parents and three-year-old brother. The family earns money one way: the children throw themselves in front of cars, and drivers who want no part of the police pay cash to make it stop.

The screenplay draws from a real case that became public in mid-1960s Japan. Oshima doesn't cast Toshio as a symbol — he watches the boy closely: Toshio builds a private inner world of space soldiers and ice planets, sealed off from what his parents call their situation.

Oshima was one of the driving forces of Japan's New Wave, and this is among his quietest films. No manifestos, no rage — just a child in the backseat, old enough to take a car's impact and young enough to still believe in something above the clouds. Stream Boy (1969) online on iFILM.