01
The Ballad of Narayama
Why this pick
Imamura again turns an isolated community’s harsh customs into a sensuous, unsettling social epic, balancing earthy humour, cruelty and an unsentimental fascination with survival.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1968 2h 53m JPN
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
Profound Desires of the Gods
Drama
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
If you loved Profound Desires of the Gods, try these.
01
02
Vengeance Is Mine
Why this pick
Its fractured, morally abrasive portrait of postwar Japan shares the earlier film’s anthropological eye, dark vitality and refusal to simplify damaged people.
03
Intentions of Murder
Why this pick
A volatile domestic struggle rendered with feverish physicality and biting social observation; it has Imamura’s talent for making humiliation, desire and resilience feel uncomfortably alive.
04
The Insect Woman
Why this pick
This sprawling woman’s life story carries a similarly unsparing yet compassionate interest in those pushed to society’s margins, with raw energy rather than polished melodrama.
05
Woman in the Dunes
Why this pick
A man’s encounter with an isolated, ritual-bound world becomes an intensely tactile existential ordeal, matching the oppressive landscape and primal tension of Imamura’s island vision.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
Presenting a vast chronicle of life on the remote Kurage Island, the film centres on the disgraced, superstitious, interbred Futori family and the Tokyo engineer sent to supervise the creation of a new well for the Sugar Mill – an encounter which leads to both conflict and complicity in strange and powerful ways.
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