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You can stream Dodes'ka-den (1970) on Max with a subscription.

On a Tokyo dump’s shantytown edge, interwoven vignettes follow residents scraping by: a boy who “drives” an imaginary trolley, a homeless father and son designing a dream house, a young woman brutalized at home, drunks, schemers, and saints of small kindnesses. Kurosawa crafts a ragged mosaic of hardship, fantasy, and flickers of grace that keep people moving forward.

While most social dramas focus on tragedy, this vision finds a surreal, rhythmic joy within the scrap heaps of a post-war Tokyo slum. A boy’s imaginary tram ride transforms a landscape of poverty into a vivid, hallucinatory playground of human resilience.

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