Children of the Beehive + Children of War

Director: Hiroshi Shimizu, Jocelyne Saab

1976 / 96min / DCP

Independently produced by Shimizu following his parting of ways with Shochiku studios, Children of the Beehive offers a cross-country tour of a postwar Japan that everywhere displays the livid scars of still-recent bombings, following a newly repatriated and demobbed soldier as he leads a band of orphans found living hand-to-mouth—children cast from an orphanage founded by Shimizu, called “the Beehive”—on a trek to the reformatory school in which our unnamed protagonist was raised. Preceded by Saab’s documentary short Children of War, made in the immediate aftermath of the Karantina massacre, in which the filmmaker investigates the ways in which the psychological trauma that the Lebanese Civil War has inflicted on Beirut children emerges in their games and artworks.

Children of War (Jocelyn Saab, 1976, 10 mins)

Children of the Beehive (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1948, 86 mins)

Part of Maybe If You Smile They Will One Day All Return