In this deeply moving piece about a noble family torn apart in medieval Japan, we see the world primarily through a brother and sister than have been sold into slavery as children, growing up with the knowledge of their noble birth and wise upbringing, yet having to experience the roughest of environments at the hands of the title character, a slavemaster and tax collector.

In this environment, the children experience both mercy and brutality and with the memory of their saintly father's teaching on mercy, must decide from which they will ultimately draw their identities and how they will respond to the ugly world in which they must now survive. Ultimately the film questions the very use of power in an unjust society.

This film also explores some of the brutality of Japan's romanticized past, particularly the victimization of women, yet in it we see so much that speaks of the beauty and agony of the human condition.

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