Featured at this year’s AFI FEST 2025 is a carefully-researched documentary by filmmaker Daniel Raim entitled “Ozu’s Diaries” – an intimate biography and revelatory portrait of prolific Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. Drawing from a treasure trove of archival materials – journals, notebooks, correspondence, photographs, interviews and unseen home movies – the film opens a rare window into Ozu’s inner world and artistic process. After Ozu died on his sixtieth birthday, December 12, 1963, some thirty-two diaries were discovered. They were from 1933 to 1963, and though a few years were missing, they offer a commentary on the life of the director and reveal something of his personality.
Ozu rarely wrote about the directing or editing of his films. He writes more fully about the films of other directors. On August 31, 1934, he and fellow director Mikio Naruse enjoyed Scarface and then talked about it while having pork cutlets. A year later, he goes alone to see Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, which he calls “a really successful comedy.” Ozu does not like everything he sees, however. January 24, 1951: “Read the scenario that [Eijiro] Hisaita wrote for Kurosawa’s The Idiot: “Incomprehensible!” Later he saw A Japanese Tragedy, directed by one of his former assistants, Keisuke Kinoshita, and found it to be “an ambitious film but badly made and without any real interest.” On the other hand, in 1955, he finds Naruse’s Floating Clouds “a real masterpiece.”
In his youth, Yasujiro Ozu used to go to the cinema as often as possible, taking notes on styles and techniques, trying to grasp as much as he could of the art that fascinated him. Yet in his diaries he wrote: “Too much analysis spoils the pleasure of the film.”
And it is precisely with a mind free from analytical attitudes that one should enjoy The Ozu Diaries, a film that fills our eyes with wonder and brings audiences closer to a director still too little known. The work of documentarian Daniel Raim, in a sense, “corrects” the misunderstanding created by Donald Richie, who had inadvertently helped to place the director at a remote cultural distance, with the consequent and presumed difficulty of access.
In his seminal essay Ozu: His Life and Films (1977), Donald Richie summarized the stylization, essentiality, and transcendental tension of Ozu’s cinema in the phrase “the most Japanese of Japanese directors.” A definition that, over time, has been trivialized and turned into a label, contributing to the Western perception of Ozu’s cinema as distant and impenetrable. With a fresh approach and extraordinary meticulousness, Daniel Raim swiftly bridges that distance and leads us “inside” Ozu’s life, among the images of a cinema that blossomed precisely from that life. An existence spent “painting the same rose,” each time studying new colors and shades.
Drawing on a precious collection of archival materials (diaries, notebooks, correspondence, photographs, interviews, and previously unseen home footage), Raim tells “Ozu through Ozu,” revealing the hidden correspondences between cinema and biography. The Japanese master comes alive in the bond between word and image, and it feels as though we are directly engaged in an intimate conversation. If Ozu managed to create with the viewer a deeply personal relationship – allowing the gaze of his characters to meet our own – Raim aspires to that same intimacy, keeping the dialogue between audience and images alive: the sequences flow as a “corporeal illustration” of experience itself and shine with a new light.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa explains in a particularly illuminating way the power of Ozu’s cinema:“Most people, watching his films for the first time, feel that everything flows naturally; it seems real at first glance, but there is something strangely unreal, hidden. It is as if we were glimpsing the very secret of cinema.”
We discover, for instance, that That Night’s Wife stages Ozu’s meningitis and his mother’s strength, evoked through the character of Emiko Yagumo; or that the many train sequences recall his move from Tokyo to Matsusaka; and that the striking realism of Chishū Ryū’s death in There Was a Father intertwines with the death of Ozu’s own father. Then comes the glimpse of wartime reality, the death of his friend Sadao Yamanaka, and the subsequent need to erase the scars of conflict by turning to stories of everyday life – the lotus flower born from the mud. Life slips away; and through The Ozu Diaries, we grasp that vision of transience pervading Ozu’s cinema with its melancholy, shimmering impermanence.
The Ozu Diaries draws from master Yasujiro Ozu’s private journals, letters, photographs, drawings, and never-before-seen home movies to reveal the man behind the legend. Through Ozu’s own words, combined with reflections from Kyoko Kagawa, Wim Wenders, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Tsai Ming-liang, and Luc Dardenne, the film traces how Ozu transformed personal loss and wartime trauma into enduring masterpieces such as Early Summer, Tokyo Story, and An Autumn Afternoon.
Director Daniel Raim explained one of the challenges he faced in making this documentary: “In 2017, while making a short film for The Criterion Collection titled In Search of Ozu, I sensed a deeper story waiting to be told: the human being behind the films. The most challenging part was confronting Ozu’s wartime experience. His diaries from that period and postwar interviews reveal a rupture – a profound loss. As Tanaka Masasumi wrote, “Ozu survived the war. But we cannot deny that his humanity was in crisis.” In the decades that followed, he created some of the most tender, humorous, formally playful, and emotionally resonant films in cinema.
Ozu never married and, excepting three compulsory stints in the military, lived almost his whole life with his mother, who died the year before him. Tellingly, his movies return again and again to the scene of an adult on the painful threshold of leaving their childhood home.
