Tag Archives: Shôhei Imamura

The award-winning director of such esteemed films as Black Rain and The Ballad of Narayama has chosen here to tell the decidedly dicey true tale of Iheiji Muraoka Read More »

Plastics salesman Oshima disappeared without a word to anyone, and has been missing for two years. Read More »

A housewife living under her tyrannical husband has her life stressfully turned upside down after getting raped by a burglar. Read More »

Mr. Ogata lives a complicated life: he is a pornographer making two skin flicks per day and trying to stay beneath the radar screen of the local mob Read More »

Mr and Mrs Shizuma, and their niece Yasuko, make their way through the ruins of Hiroshima, just after the atomic bomb has dropped. Read More »

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Amorality in Japan. Tome is born into poverty in rural Japan, in the late 1910s. Chuji, her father, dotes on her; her mother is less faithful. Read More »

Being a faithful ‘company man’, Yoshikawa moves steadily ahead within the Toho corporation. But Kaji, his old friend, makes his way through the dark side of the social world, working for a power broker who is plotting to take over Toho. Read More »

It is a documentary on one of the Japanese “karayuki-san,” who were women that were taken from their homes in Japan and used as prostitutes in the post-war period. Read More »

The star of this documentary is a quintessential Imamura heroine: a hard-nosed, ruthless survivor, with a sense of loyalty and an earthy sense of humor. Read More »

Kinta is caught in the mesh of poverty and opts out by joining the local yakuza gang. His greed draws him into the drug dealing, pimping, and racketeering that fill the gang’s coffers. Read More »

In a poor 19th century rural Japanese village, everyone who reaches the age of 70 has to climb a nearby mountain to die. An old woman is getting close to the cut-off age, and we follow her last days with her family.
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Dr. Akagi, a rural physician in Japan during WWII, wages a one-man crusade against hepetitis, earning him a reputation as “Dr. Liver.” But his fanatic campaign brings him into disfavor with the Japanese army, and as the war seems more and more hopeless for the Japanese, Dr. Akagi finds himself increasingly a scapegoat.
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White-collar worker Yamashita finds out that his wife has a lover visiting her when he’s away, suddenly returns home and kills her. After eight years in prison, he returns to live in a small village, opens a barber shop (he was trained as a barber in prison) and talks almost to no-one except for the eel he “befriended” in prison. One day he finds the unconscious body of Keiko, who attempted suicide and reminds him of his wife. She starts to work at his shop, but he doesn’t let her become close to him.
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On August 15, ten years after the Pacific War, five people meet at a station. Their purpose is to dig out a cache of morphine — now worth sixty million yen — that HASHIMOTO, an army medical officer, buried in an air-raid shelter in this city on the day the war ended. The five are: SHIMA, a beautiful woman who claims that she is HASHIMOTO’s younger sister and that her brother is dead; NAKADA, a pharmacist; ONUMA, who owns a Chinese restaurant; YAMAMOTO, a thug; and SAWAI, who says he is a junior high school teacher. But HASHIMOTO originally had only three accomplices — and hid the morphine late at night, so they did not know each other’s identities. There is one person too many in the group, but they do not know whom. A butcher shop now stands over the old air-raid shelter. The five decide to rent a vacant house across the street, and dig a tunnel to the butcher shop.
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