A Cheerful Girl / The Blue Sky Maiden (青空娘, 1957)

Marking Masumura Yasuzo’s first collaboration with actress Ayako Wakao, The Blue Sky Maiden began a longstanding partnership that would span twenty films. Yuko (Wakao), a freshly graduated high school student, leaves her small village for Tokyo after discovering that she was born from her father’s affair. Moving into her estranged father’s dysfunctional household, she finds herself caught between the family’s tensions and resentments while adjusting to life in a rapidly westernising post-war Japan.

Led by Wakao’s spirited performance, The Blue Sky Maiden observes the changing social and familial structures of post-war Japan.