On the website of 100 Years of Kaneto Shindo a quote is splashed across its introductory page: 'As long as I have a life, I will live it through and through.'
The motto was written in ink by Shindo last year, when he was 99. The filmmaker lived up to his pledge, made just as Postcard was doing the rounds and reaping critical acclaim in Japan and on the festival circuit.
The film turned out to be his swan song: Shindo died last month.
Shindo, who was determined to live life to the fullest, proved to be one of the greatest survivors of his generation. He died a month after celebrating his 100th birthday in April, outliving not just his contemporaries Akira Kurosawa, Keisuke Kinoshita and Kon Ichikawa, but also some of the so-called New Wave directors who emerged after him, such as Shohei Imamura, Hiroshi Teshigahara and Koreyoshi Kurahara.
Yet Shindo's genius could have been denied the world when he was conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army in 1943, during the second world war. He had started working in the film industry in the 1930s and by the early '40s he had been art director for more than 50 films, a screenwriter for six, and then Kenji Mizoguchi's assistant on, among others, Straits of Love and Hate and The 47 Ronin.
But he was never sent to the battlefront, spending his time in Japan cleaning buildings for military use. As defeat loomed, he was thrown into a labour camp - a minor misfortune, as it turned out, compared to what would have happened if he had been allowed to return to his hometown, Hiroshima.
