The Island

In the organizer's words:

裸の島 Hadaka no shima

Director: SHINDÔ Kaneto
1960, 95 minutes, OmeU, b/w, DCP

With Hadaka no shima, director and screenwriter Shindô Kaneto (1912-2012) created a sound film in impressive black-and-white Cinemascope images in which not a single word is spoken. Made on a shoestring budget, the film became a worldwide success and is a poetic allegory of the lives of people who are exposed to the adversities of nature and fight for survival with tremendous strength and perseverance.

A couple lives with their two young sons on a tiny island in the Seto Inland Sea. Life there is hard and due to the lack of water, the husband and wife have to row to another island every day to provide themselves and the plants with water. They tirelessly carry buckets of water up the mountain and get by, until one day a tragedy occurs.

Movie series
In search of criminals and new images - Japanese films from the 1960s

In the 1960s and 1970s, Japan was in a phase of economic, political and social upheaval, which also had a serious impact on the country's film industry. As a counter-movement to the films of the previously established master directors, works emerged that were in part radically new in their themes and aesthetics and moved beyond the existing pigeonholes.

With seven films made between 1958 and 1968, this series provides an insight into the cinema of the 1960s and presents works by five directors who were among the most important representatives of their time: Imamura Shôhei (1926-2006), Nomura Yoshitarô (1919-2005), Shindô Kaneto (1912-2012), Shinoda Masahiro (*1931) and Suzuki Seijun (1923-2017).

Three Nikkatsu action films by Suzuki Seijun, who is considered an experimental visionary in Japanese film history, can be seen. In his first color film, Imamura Shôhei dissects the archaic relationships of a village community marked by incest. Shindô Kaneto is represented with his impressive global success about the adversities of life. Finally, the crime film by Nomura Yoshitarô shows the dramatic chase after a murderer and with his film noir, Shinoda Masahiro has left a lasting mark on the yakuza thriller genre.

Price information:

Admission free