Farewell to Spring 惜春鳥

Film

Feature Film
35mm

Keisuke Kinoshita’s achingly beautiful film is about the intense feelings between five young men who return to their Aizu hometown.

Information

Programme History

Part of Queer East Festival 2026

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Runtime: 102 Mins
Year: 1959
Country: Japan

Five young men reunite one spring in their Aizu hometown, but their happy reminiscences about childhood soon give way to conflict and betrayal. This Japanese film from 1959 is rooted in local legends: geisha dances, folk songs, and the story of the ‘white tigers’, teenage samurai whose heroic mythology is contrasted with the messier postwar realities faced by the young men. While director Keisuke Kinoshita is now generally recognised as queer, Farewell to Spring provokes broader questions about what a queer film might have looked like in the 1950s. The melodrama focuses on intense feelings between men, and one character with a disability is coded as homosexual. Yet it is perhaps the highly critical perspective on heterosexual norms and gendered traditions that mark out this achingly beautiful film as a pioneering work of queer cinema.