- Heinosuke Horie Production It is Yasujirō Ozu's first film in color, while Japan's first color film, Keisuke Kinoshita's Carmen Comes Home, had been released in 1951. Ozu chose Agfa film from Germany over Kodak or Fujifilm, as he felt that it conveyed red colors better. The meaning of "equinox flower" or "higanbana" of the title is the red Lycoris. Shochiku requested that Ozu shoot Equinox Flower in color primarily to showcase Fujiko Yamamoto, the Daiei superstar it had borrowed for the film. The movie is constructed to spotlight the actress, who is elevated with extended dialogue scenes as a protégé of Hirayama who drives the plot resolution from the sidelines, and she won the 1958 Blue Ribbon Award as Best Actress for Equinox Flower and The Snowy Heron, which featured her in a much showier starring role. Yamamoto also receives what may be the only solo screen credit in any of Ozu's films, which starred some of the biggest names in Japanese cinema. Release Critical reception Equinox Flower garnered 88% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 7.4/10. Dave Kehr praised the film as "gentle, spare, and ultimately elusive, in a quietly satisfying way." Equinox Flower received four votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the world's greatest films. Roger Ebert wrote, " In Equinox Flower, a Japanese film by the old master Yasujiro Ozu, there is this sequence of shots: A room with a red teapot in the foreground. Another view of the room. The mother folding clothes. A shot down a corridor with a mother crossing it at an angle, and then a daughter crossing at the back. A reverse shot in the hallway as the arriving father is greeted by the mother and daughter. A shot as the father leaves the frame, then the mother, then the daughter. A shot as the mother and father enter the room, as in the background the daughter picks up the red pot and leaves the frame. This sequence of timed movement and cutting is as perfect as any music ever written, any dance, any poem." Home media In 2011, the BFI released a Region 2 Dual Format Edition (Blu-ray + DVD). Included with this release is a standard definition presentation of There Was a Father. References External links Rotten Tomatoes Reviews 1970 version of Japanese film poster Equinox Flower at Ozu-san.com 1958 films Films