There Was a Father (1942) by Yasujiro Ozu.
“My relationship with Ozu is distinctly twofold. On the one hand, it is very private and personal, while on the other, it is that of a colleague in the film industry. True, I was thirty years younger than him, but I believe my interest in his work on an intimate level is equivalent the interest I’ve had as a filmmaker. You can see these two poles in my book on Ozu.
My personal relationship with Ozu dates very far back to my childhood during the war. When I was nine, my parents took me to the movie theater and introduced me to There Was a Father. Of course, I was too young at the time to understand the story, the structure and the plot elements of the film. But I clearly remember one scene in particular where a dazzling light shines upon a valley, and at the bottom of this valley, near a river, a father and son are fishing together. Repetition is used in this fishing scene, with the father and son tirelessly repeating the same movements. Of course, as a child I became bored watching the same movements continually repeated, and I ended up wondering what purpose this repetition served. What struck me the most was that this father and son repeated exactly the same movement, which consisted of casting a line and then re-casting it when the current took it back upstream. When I compared this father and son to my own father and myself, their difference became clear: the father was big and strong, and if he’d raced against me, he would have necessarily won. And yet in this film, the father and son performed the same synchronized movement despite their difference in size and stature. At the end of the scene, the father simply utters the following words: You and I are now going to be separated, you’re going away to school and although we’re father and son, we’re going to become strangers. Listening to his father’s words, the son, who’s kept on casting his line, eventually stops and lets his father fish alone. Thus in this scene, an identical, repetitive movement eventually ceases, marking their separation. I understood much later that this scene represented every person’s destiny.
At the end of the feature, my father explained to me that the movie had been shot by a filmmaker named Ozu. It was the first time I’d heard his name; it was also the first time I became aware that a film was manufactured by a director and that it was real work, a job like any other. As luck would have it, in my career, I eventually entered Shochiku, the film studio where Ozu worked. I was thirty years his junior, however, and Ozu was nearly as old as my father: that’s why I never considered becoming his assistant and shooting films the way he did. I ended up becoming a director several years later.”

By Antoine Thirion, in Paris, on March 27, 2008.