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On this week 80 years ago, Japan accepted the Allies’ surrender terms, just days after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs that murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens. But in the eight decades since, few American films have explored World War II from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers conscripted to fight it. Clint Eastwood’s LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA is an exception. Eastwood knows how to tell a great “traditional” war story – but in LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA – his 2006 follow-up to FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS – Eastwood presents what NYT film critic A.O. Scott calls “utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights” and also ventures “is hard to think of another war movie that has gone so deeply, so sensitively, into the mind-set of the opposing side.” Set on the brink of the Battle of Iwo Jima, just months before Japan’s surrender, it intimately and humanely explores what Japanese soldiers faced as they prepared for near-certain death at the behest of the Emperor’s refusal to provide any military aid – essentially instructing them to die with honor. Of the 20,000 Japanese soldiers at Iwo Jima, only just over 1,000 survived. This film imagines what it might have been like to face those odds, especially knowing the nuclear holocaust lurking for the soldiers’ families. LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay – and won for Best Sound Editing.

Tuesday, August 12th at 1pm and 7pm