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 together for a desperate heist: digging up a stash of morphine that was buried under a butcher shop during World War II. As the group turns on each other one by one, what emerges is a mordant microcosm of social decay.
Up Next in Directed by Shohei Imamura
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Stolen Desire
Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1958 • Japan
Starring Osamu Takizawa, Shin’ichi Yanagisawa, Hiroyuki NagatoShohei 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...
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Pigs and Battleships
Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1962 • Japan
Starring Jitsuko Yoshimura, Yoko Minamida, Hiroyuki NagatoA 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...
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The Insect Woman
Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1963 • Japan
Starring Sachiko HidariBorn 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...
