Nagisa Ōshima

Nagisa Ôshima made only one ghost story in his career, and it won him Best Director at Cannes. In a Japanese village at the end of the nineteenth century, eroticism, guilt and fear seep into one another in this haunted, suffocating follow-up to “In the Realm of the Senses”. — In a Japanese village in 1895, Toyoji comes home from the army and lusts after Seki, the rickshaw driver’s wife. He is much younger than she is and not a patient man. Together they kill her husband, throw the body down a dry well and cover it with leaves. Three years pass, and the neighbours still wonder what became of Gisaburo. That is when Seki starts to see him. — Best Director | Cannes Film Festival | 1978

Desire stirs in a Japanese camp on Java in 1942, where Nagisa Ōshima (“In the Realm of the Senses”) cast two famous musicians: David Bowie as a prisoner and first-time actor Ryuichi Sakamoto as the obsessive commandant, who also wrote the score. Both sides search for their humanity in dark times. — British major Jack Celliers arrives in a Japanese prison camp and refuses to be broken, and the commandant, Yonoi, can’t take his eyes off him. Lieutenant Colonel John Lawrence, a British officer who speaks Japanese, tries to bridge the two sides, though what he passes on isn’t always a translation. Sometimes it’s what he thinks they ought to hear. — Best Original Music | BAFTA | 1984 Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1983

Nagisa Ōshima’s famous erotic film is set in 1930s Tokyo, and he had to send the negative abroad because it couldn’t be developed in Japan. The camera shows exactly what happens behind the closed doors where a maid and the hotel owner meet, yet there’s nothing pornographic about it, only compassion. — In Tokyo in 1936, Sada Abe, who once worked in a brothel, is now a maid at a small hotel. Her employer Kichizo is married, but within a few days that stops meaning anything, and he leaves his wife for her. The lovers shut themselves away in one room after another, barely eating or sleeping, and as Sada grows more and more possessive, he gives in to her ever more willingly.