Kon Ichikawa

was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His work displays a vast range in genre and style, from the anti-war films ''The Burmese Harp'' (1956) and ''Fires on the Plain'' (1959), to the documentary ''Tokyo Olympiad'' (1965), which won two BAFTA Film Awards, and the 19th-century revenge drama ''An Actor's Revenge'' (1963). His film ''Odd Obsession'' (1959) won the Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.

At his death in 2008, ''The New York Times'' recalled that "''The Globe and Mail'', the Canadian newspaper, called him in 2001 “the last living link between the golden age of Japanese cinema, the spunky New Wave that followed and contemporary Japanese film.”" Provided by Wikipedia