Hey, Toronto! Win Tickets To See Classic Japanese Drama SUZAKI PARADISE This Saturday!

The ScreenAnarchy curated Tokyo Drifters: 100 Years Of Nikkatsu screening series continues at the TIFF Bell Lightbox this Saturday with a rare screening of Kawashima Yuzo's Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District.  Considered one of the greatest Japanese films of all time by a master filmmaker largely overlooked in the west, Suzaki Paradise will screen from a subtitled 35mm print and you can win tickets now!

A more sombre offering from Nikkatsu, Yuzo Kawashima's Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District offers an unsparing look at postwar poverty and desperation. Young married couple Tsutae (Michiyo Aratama) and Yoshiji (Tatsuya Mihashi) arrive in Tokyo with little more than the clothes on their backs and take up residence just outside Suzaki, one of Tokyo's most notorious red-light districts. Lusting after the high life, Tsutae scorns Yoshiji's attempts to try to scratch out an honest living, and is soon drawn across the bridge into the beckoning pleasure centre, where she sets out to make a living off her looks. Regarding its rootless, weak-willed protagonists with remorseless clarity and a bracing lack of sentiment, Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District is another triumph from the great, perpetually overlooked master Kawashima, and was voted along with Kawashima's following film The Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (also screening in this series) as one of the best Japanese films of all time by leading Japanese film magazine Kinema Jumpo.

We've got two pairs of tickets to give away for the screening and all you need to do for a shot at them is email me here and say you want in on the Nikkatsu ticket giveaway!