About the Series Perhaps only art can accurately examine the adolescent’s extreme state of transformation, because art is itself an adolescent impulse—in constant pursuit of a new, anguished, experimental, destructive, lyrical, language with which to communicate existence. The coming-of-age film has served to probe at the most volatile and sensitive aspects of this inescapable period of transformation and existential agony, affecting body and identity alike. This April the Bijou Film Board examines some of cinema’s most provocative and idiosyncratic chroniclers of harsh truths and raw humanism through the unflinching experiences of their young, tragic protagonists. The story of a family’s quiet endurance as it is split up and its members are sold into slavery and prostitution in 11th-century Japan is one of the greatest of Kenji Mizoguchi’s films and one of the greatest works of the cinema.
a place steeped in local flavor & history, alive with participatory art, and a living room to the University of Iowa. #downtowniowacity
