Dodes'ka-den

This was Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's first project ever in colour. Kurosawa focuses upon life in a shanty town near Tokyo, in which people live with their fantasies. We watch as a variety of unfortunates debase themselves to survive. Somehow, they emerge with more innate dignity than the so-called "better" people. There is an old man and his son who build an imaginary house, a silent businessman who is obsessed by the idea of his wife’s infidelity, children who support their parents by scrounging or by tedious and ill-paying endeavours and Rokkuchan, a retarded boy who brings meaning and routine to his life by driving an imaginary streetcar, repeating the sound “dodes’kaden, dodes’kaden,…”