Es war einmal ein Vater

Contains only 353 shots. The average shot length is 14.8 seconds.

Following WWII and the restructuring of Japan, the occupying allied forces prohibited a number of existing Japanese works that dealt with patriotism and the war, and "There Was a Father" was one of many works that suffered from censor cuts. A total of seven minutes were removed from the 94 minute film for its reissue in post-war Japan. A number of films were eventually re-released uncut after the occupation, but unfortunately for "There Was a Father", the original negative was lost and so were the original prints. The best existing element was an 87 minute 16mm duplicating negative of the post-war censored version. In the 1990s, the Russian state film archive Gosfilmofond discovered that it had an incomplete 75 minute 35mm print of "There Was a Father" missing two reels, though it was indeed a Japanese theatrical print that included uncensored scenes. Five of the seven censored minutes have been restored for the 2023 4K restoration by Shochiku and the National Film Archive of Japan, with the restored version running 92 minutes.

Referenced in Ikite wa mita keredo - Ozu Yasujirô den (1983)