There Was a Father (1942) on Netflix
Shuhei Horikawa, a widowed math teacher, raises his ten-year-old son Ryohei by himself. When a pupil drowns on a class excursion, he blames himself and gives up teaching.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb7.5/103,604 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
A widower with little money, Shuhei Horikawa teaches mathematics at a middle school, where his ten-year-old son Ryohei is also a pupil. On a class excursion, one of the boys slips away by boat with a classmate and drowns. Shuhei holds himself to blame and gives up his teaching post. He enrolls Ryohei as a boarder at a junior high school in Ueda and moves to Tokyo, taking work there to pay for his son's schooling. Father and son live apart, and the separation weighs on the boy. More than ten years on, Ryohei has finished college and teaches in Akita, while Shuhei works at a textile factory in Tokyo.
Cast
- Haruhiko Tsudaas Ryohei a child
- Yûsuke Kurataas Teacher of junior high school
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about There Was a Father (1942)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Scenes of patriotic poetry and music were cut from the only surviving prints of There Was a Father by occupation censors; they were restored in 2023 for a presentation of the film at the Venice Film Festival.
- Yasujirō Ozu wrote the first draft of There Was a Father before a 1937 trip to China, then rewrote the script on his return to Japan because he felt it "could still be improved".
