Sansho the Bailiff

“Without mercy, man is like a beast.”

On the road to join her exiled husband, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka) is seized by slave traders and torn from her two children. Zushiô (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) and his sister Anju (Kyōko Kagawa) are sold to Sanshô dayû (Eitarō Shindō), a bailiff in eleventh-century Japan who works his captives without mercy. Kenji Mizoguchi holds the children against the water and the road they came by, a mother's voice still calling somewhere behind them.