is a 2006 war film directed and co-produced by
Clint EastwoodClinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Eastwood first came to prominence as a supporting cast member in the TV series Rawhide...
, and starring
Ken Watanabeis a Japanese stage, film, and television actor. To English-speaking audiences he is known for playing tragic hero characters, such as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi in Letters from Iwo Jima and Lord Katsumoto Moritsugu in The Last Samurai, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best...
and
Kazunari Ninomiya, often called , is a Japanese idol, singer, songwriter, actor, voice actor and radio host. He is a member of Japanese boy band Arashi and is best known to movie audiences for his portrayal as Private Saigo in the 2006 Clint Eastwood war film Letters from Iwo Jima.Ninomiya began his career in the...
. The film portrays the
Battle of Iwo JimaThe Battle of Iwo Jima , or Operation Detachment, was a major battle in which the United States fought for and captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Empire of Japan. The U.S...
from the perspective of the
JapanJapan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
ese
soldiers-Foundation:During the Meiji Restoration, the military forces loyal to the Emperor were samurai drawn primarily from the loyalist feudal domains of Satsuma and Chōshū...
and is a companion piece to Eastwood's
Flags of Our Fathersis a 2006 American war film directed, co-produced and scored by Clint Eastwood and written by William Broyles, Jr. and Paul Haggis. It is based on the book of the same name written by James Bradley and Ron Powers about the Battle of Iwo Jima, the five Marines and one Navy Corpsman who were involved...
, which depicts the same battle from the American
viewpointPoint of view, sometimes used interchangeably with viewpoint, may refer to:* Point of view or narrative mode, the perspective of the narrative voice; the pronoun used in narration* Point of view , the angle of painter vision...
; the two films were shot back to back.
Letters from Iwo Jima is almost entirely in
Japaneseis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, but was produced by American companies Warner Brothers,
DreamWorksDreamWorks Pictures, also known as DreamWorks, LLC, DreamWorks SKG, DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC, DreamWorks Studios or DW Studios, LLC, is an American film studio which develops, produces, and distributes films, video games and television programming...
,
Malpaso ProductionsMalpaso Productions, originally known as The Malpaso Company, is Clint Eastwood's production company. It was established in 1967 by Eastwood's financial adviser Irving Leonard for the film Hang 'Em High, using finances from the Dollars trilogy...
, and
Amblin EntertainmentAmblin Entertainment is an American film and television production company founded by director and producer Steven Spielberg and film producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall in 1981. Amblin is only a production company, and has never distributed its own movies, nor has it fully financed its...
. After the box office failure of
Flags of Our Fathers, DreamWorks sold the United States distribution rights to Warner Brothers, who had the international rights.
Letters from Iwo Jima was released in
JapanJapan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
on December 9, 2006 and received a limited release in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
on December 20, 2006 in order to be eligible for consideration for the
79th Academy AwardsThe 79th Academy Awards ceremony , honored the best films of 2006 and took place on February 25, 2007 at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on ABC. Ellen DeGeneres hosted the ceremony for the first time. The producer was Laura Ziskin. The announcers were Don LaFontaine and Gina Tuttle.The nominees were...
.
