Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu was a Japanese film director whose career, spanning the silent era through the early 1960s, is best known for quiet, restrained family dramas depicting the everyday tensions of postwar Japanese domestic life. His best known film, Tokyo Story, follows an aging couple visiting their adult children in the city and is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. Ozu developed a highly distinctive visual style, most notably the low, near-ground tatami-mat camera position and a preference for static shots over camera movement, giving his films a contemplative stillness that became internationally influential on later directors.