Hiroshi Shimizu

was a Japanese film director, who directed over 160 films during his career. Biography Early years Shimizu was born in Shizuoka Prefecture and attended Hokkaidō University, but left before graduating. He joined the Shochiku film studio in Tokyo in 1921, making his directorial debut in 1924 at the age of just 21. Career Shimizu specialised in melodramas and comedies. In his most distinguished silent films like Fue no Shiratama (1929) and Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933), he explored a Japan poised between native and Western ideas, traditionalism and liberalism, while stylistically relying on modernist and avant-garde techniques. The majority of his silent films is nowadays considered lost.