cinehunch
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Ōshima again uses formal, darkly comic ritual and emotional distance to expose institutional cruelty, with a fractured reality that echoes The Ceremony’s unsettling critique of social order.
02
Why this pick
This rigorous, visually composed political drama moves between eras and perspectives, sharing The Ceremony’s challenge to inherited authority and conventional family history.
03
Why this pick
Imamura’s unsparing portrait of one woman across decades has the same postwar social breadth and bitter attention to how family expectations shape private lives.
04
Why this pick
A radical blend of documentary texture, theatricality, and ruptured chronology, it shares The Ceremony’s confrontational New Wave style and sense of identity being shaped by social performance.
05
Why this pick
Its controlled compositions and corrosive humor turn domestic rituals into a critique of conformity, offering a later, equally uneasy vision of Japanese family life.
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01 / THE STORY
The film begins with Masuo Sakurada receiving a telegram from his cousin Terumichi. He is traveling with his cousin Ritsuko to check out his cabin and see if the telegram is true. Masuo has a flashback to the ceremony on the first anniversary of his father's death, after he and his mother are repatriated to Japan from Manchuria. Because his younger brother died before they returned from Manchuria, Masuo is expected to live for two sons.