The Ode to Joy

Jun 17, 2006

2h 15m

★ 4.5

Overview

Based on the true story of the Bandō prisoner-of-war camp in World War I. It depicts the friendship of the German POWs with the director of the camp and local residents at the stage of Naruto, Tokushima Prefecture, in Japan.

Genres

Drama

History

War

Music

Production Companies

Yomiuri Shimbun Company

Nippan Group Holdings

Shinano Art & Culture Consultant Co., Ltd.

TV Asahi

Tokyo FM

Toei Company

The Ode to Joy Trailers

No Trailers found.

Cast

Matsue

Ken Matsudaira

Kurt Heinrich

Bruno Ganz

Iko

Hiroshi Abe

Takagi

Jun Kunimura

Carl Baum

Oliver Bootz

Herman Lake

Kostja Ullmann

Shio

Suzuka Ohgo

Shirō Mifune

Journalists Ichiro Sakai and Junko cover the wreckage of a typhoon when an enormous egg is found and claimed by greedy entrepreneurs. Mothra's fairies arrive and are aided by the journalists in a plea for its return. As their requests are denied, Godzilla arises near Nagoya and the people of Infant Island must decide if they are willing to answer Japan's own pleas for help.

6.4

To End All Wars

Sep 2, 2001

Based on a real-life story, this drama focuses on a small group of Allied soldiers in Burma who are held captive by the Japanese. Capt. Ernest Gordon, Lt. Jim Reardon and Maj. Ian Campbell are among the military officers kept imprisoned and routinely beaten and deprived of food. While Campbell wants to rebel and attempt an escape, Gordon tries to take a more stoic approach, an attitude that proves to be surprisingly resonant.

7.0

Sugar Glass Bottle

Jun 8, 2025

Near-future Tokyo. Kou, through the help of his high school best friend, finds a surprising way to express his mounting frustration at the insidious forces of commercialism that are forcing out the neighbors he cares most about. Initially inspired by a prank that the writer-director Neo Sora (The Chicken, 2020) had pulled on him in his childhood, a sense of warm nostalgia and cold, material reality intermingle to tell a tale set in the not-so-distant future about disappearing spaces and the forces of policing and gentrification that drills this process forward.

7.6

Memoirs of a Geisha

Dec 6, 2005

In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.

8.0

Rashomon

Aug 26, 1950

Four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife.

8.0

The Lives of Others

Mar 23, 2006

In 1984 East Berlin, dedicated Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler begins spying on a famous playwright and his actress-lover Christa-Maria. Wiesler becomes unexpectedly sympathetic to the couple, and faces conflicting loyalties when his superior takes a liking to Christa-Maria.

7.6

The Last Samurai

Dec 5, 2003

Nathan Algren is an American hired to instruct the Japanese army in the ways of modern warfare, which finds him learning to respect the samurai and the honorable principles that rule them. Pressed to destroy the samurai's way of life in the name of modernization and open trade, Algren decides to become an ultimate warrior himself and to fight for their right to exist.

7.9

Grand Illusion

Jun 4, 1937

A group of French soldiers, including the patrician Captain de Boeldieu and the working-class Lieutenant Maréchal, grapple with their own class differences after being captured and held in a World War I German prison camp. When the men are transferred to a high-security fortress, they must concoct a plan to escape beneath the watchful eye of aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, who has formed an unexpected bond with de Boeldieu.

8.2

Night and Fog

Jan 29, 1956

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

7.4

Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade

Nov 17, 1999

A member of an elite paramilitary counter-terrorism unit becomes traumatized after witnessing the suicide bombing of a young girl and is forced to undergo retraining. However, unbeknownst to him, he becomes a key player in a dispute between rival police divisions, as he finds himself increasingly involved with the sister of the girl he saw die.

7.8

The Bridge on the River Kwai

Oct 11, 1957

The classic story of English POWs in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid the war effort of their Japanese captors. British and American intelligence officers conspire to blow up the structure, but Col. Nicholson, the commander who supervised the bridge's construction, has acquired a sense of pride in his creation and tries to foil their plans.

8.1

M

May 11, 1931

In this classic German thriller, Hans Beckert, a serial killer who preys on children, becomes the focus of a massive Berlin police manhunt. Beckert's heinous crimes are so repellant and disruptive to city life that he is even targeted by others in the seedy underworld network. With both cops and criminals in pursuit, the murderer soon realizes that people are on his trail, sending him into a tense, panicked attempt to escape justice.

7.6

Dolls

Oct 12, 2002

Dolls takes puppeteering as its overriding motif, which relates thematically to the action provided by the live characters. Chief among those tales is the story of Matsumoto and Sawako, a young couple whose relationship is about to be broken apart by the former's parents, who have insisted their son take part in an arranged marriage to his boss' daughter.

6.0

Attack! The Battle for New Britain

Jun 20, 1944

Actual footage by the United States Signal Corps of the landing and attack on Arawe Beach, Cape Glouster, New Britain island in 1943 in the South Pacific theatre of World War Two, and the handicaps of the wild jungle in addition to the Japanese snipers and pill-box emplacements.

6.5

The Pride of the Firm

Apr 30, 1914

Der Stolz der Firma, meaning The Pride of the Business, is a classic German silent film from 1914. The film tells the story of a shrewd apprentice and is filmed in the comical style of director Lubitsch. This is one of the few Lubitsch films from World War I that wasn’t lost.

7.5

Doctor Zhivago

Dec 22, 1965

The life of a Russian physician and poet who, although married to another, falls in love with a political activist's wife and experiences hardship during World War I and then the October Revolution.

8.3

The Great Dictator

Oct 15, 1940

Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecution from Hynkel's regime.