Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1958 • Japan
Starring Hiroyuki Nagato, Misako Watanabe, Ko Nishimura

Director Shohei Imamura’s typically hardscrabble vision of human survival in postwar Japan blends black comedy with raw social commentary as it follows a quintet of unsavory characters who come toge...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1958 • Japan
Starring Osamu Takizawa, Shin’ichi Yanagisawa, Hiroyuki Nagato

Shohei Imamura’s debut feature immediately established his iconoclastic sensibility in its robust, ribald portrait of a ragtag band of outsiders getting by on the margins of society. Followin...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1962 • Japan
Starring Jitsuko Yoshimura, Yoko Minamida, Hiroyuki Nagato

A dazzling, unruly portrait of postwar Japan, PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS details, with escalating absurdity, the desperate power struggles between small-time gangsters in the port town of Yokosuka. Sho...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1963 • Japan
Starring Sachiko Hidari

Born in a rural farming village in 1918, Tomé survives decades of Japanese social upheaval, as well as abuse and servitude at the hands of various men. Yet Shohei Imamura, ever the cinematic “entomologist,” refuses to make a victi...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1964 • Japan
Starring Masumi Harukawa, Kô Nishimura, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi

Sadako (Masumi Harukawa), cursed by generations before her and neglected by her common-law husband, falls prey to a brutal home intruder. But rather than become a victim, she forges a path to her...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1966 • Japan
Starring Shoichi Ozawa, Sumiko Sakamoto, Masaomi Kondo

Subu makes pornographic films. He sees nothing wrong with it. They are an aid to a repressed society, and he uses the money to support his landlady, Haru, and her family. From time to time, Haru shar...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1968 • Japan
Starring Kazuo Kitamura, Rentaro Mikuni, Choichiro Kawarasaki

In many ways the ultimate expression of director Shohei Imamura’s vision of a world ruled by elemental instinct and chaos, this stunning, visually ambitious epic follows Kariya (Kazuo Kitamura...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1979 • Japan
Starring Ken Ogata, Mayumi Ogawa, Mitsuko Baisho

A thief, a murderer, and a charming lady-killer, Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) is on the run from the police. Director Shohei Imamura turns this fact-based story—about the seventy-eight-day killing spree of a r...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1981 • Japan
Starring Shigeru Izumiya, Kaori Momoi, Masao Kusakari

In the 1860s, near the turbulent end of the Edo era, Genji (Shigeru Izumiya), a peasant returning to Japan after six years of exile in America, searches for his wife and becomes swept up in the curren...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1983 • Japan
Starring Ken Ogata, Sumiko Sakamoto, Tonpei Hidari

Imbued with the power of myth, Shohei Imamura’s Palme d’Or–winning magnum opus is a stark and stunning vision of a world ruled by the elemental laws of nature and survival. Against the backdrop of the ch...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1987 • Japan
Starring Ken Ogata, Mitsuko Baisho, Ko Chun-Hsiung

This fierce satire of Japanese colonial ambition traces the true story of Iheiji Muraoka (Ken Ogata), a Japanese spy in early-twentieth-century Manchuria, as he turns to another profession to “help” his ...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1997 • Japan
Starring Koji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu, Akira Emoto

Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival—a prize it shared with Abbas Kiarostami’s TASTE OF CHERRY—this late-career triumph from director Shohei Imamura begins with a shocking act of viole...