Directed by international famed Akira Kurosawa and starring Richard Gere, Rhapsody in August, is presented by First Tuesday Social Justice Films. 1991-  PG -  98 min. Japanese with English subtitles. Refreshments provided.  Audience discussion follows.

 “The movie takes place during one summer in the life of a very old woman (Sachiko Murase) whose husband was killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Her children and grandchildren have come to visit her, and there are reports from the deathbed of her brother, who immigrated to Hawaii many years before, prospered, and took an American wife and American citizenship.

"Now he is mortally ill, and while the old woman decides whether to answer his call for a last meeting, a reconciliation, he dies.

“Afterwards, her nephew, the son of her brother (Richard Gere) comes to visit. “He is half Japanese, half Caucasian, and around him the subject of her husband's death is discussed only gingerly; perhaps he would not like to be reminded that the bomb was dropped by Americans.

“Kurosawa has always been a director of great images, and in his old age he has permitted himself more fanciful, less realistic ones. There is a great eye which opens in the sky . . . a rose, engulfed by ants . . . a twisted jungle gym of a school playground, left the way it looked after the heat of the bomb melted it into a grotesque sculpture,” wrote Roger Ebert in a 1992 review.

http://www.firsttuesdayfilms.org/images/rhapsody_in_august.jpg;  https://youtu.be/342LbwLJh5w#sthash.iCTsfBrx.dpuf

This presentation is co-sponsored by the UUCOC’s Social Justice Ministry and the Dallas Peace Center.  For more information about the film series, visit http://www.firsttuesdayfilms.org/index.shtml or http://www.facebook.com/firsttuesdayfilms.