Nagisa Oshima

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In a small Japanese village at the end of the 19th century, a rickshaw driver’s wife takes on a much younger lover and the two conspire to murder him.Read More »

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Here’s a movie that is even stranger than it was intended to be. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” is about a clash between two cultures (British and Japanese) and two styles of military service (patriotic and pragmatic). That would be enough for any movie, and there are scenes when it is enough, and the movie works pretty well.Read More »

Nagisa Oshima’s documentary details the rise of Chairman Mao during the revolution and shows the Communist Party’s struggle and cultural upheaval. Made in 1969 for NTV station, this TV documentary also questions Mao’s dictator tendency during the cultural revolution.Read More »

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Nagisa Oshima’s first feature film, A STREET OF LOVE AND HOPE paints a biting portrait of poverty and class difference through the life of a young boy who sells pigeons on the street. The radical and unflinching politics that would become Oshima’s hallmark are here on display in his earliest work.Read More »

The Catch 飼育 (1961) : Based on a prize-winning novella by Kenzaburo Oe -– Oshima removes the homoeroticism of the source but adds his typical touch of incestuous desire –- The Catch is set during the final days of World War II. A black GI is captured in a remote Japanese farming village, and becomes a pawn in a power struggle between various factions. As the villagers squabble over their “catch,” Oshima explores subjects that would become his hallmarks – Japanese hypocrisy, racism, xenophobia, insularity, scapegoating – with detached ferocity.Read More »

When a thief is caught stealing form a book shop by one of its employees, the two embark on an unusual, erotic adventure.Read More »

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Gohatto stars Beat Takeshi, Asano Tadanobu and a fifteen-year-old Matsuda Ryuhei as the beautiful son of a well-to-do merchant who joins the Shinsen Gumi militia in Kyoto for the “right to kill,” and ends up doing so both by his sword and his good looks. Gohatto explores themes of jealousy, madness and destruction within the context of bushido homoeroticism; not only does this violent love story play out within the bounds of same-sex relationships, but within a single militia.Read More »

“Certainly the oddest Oshima film yet to surface in this country,” was how Vincent Canby, an Oshima champion, characterized Dear Summer Sister when it got its first New York release in 1985, and the film remains quite amazingly strange.Read More »

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The film takes place in postwar Japan, following a Japanese clan through their wedding and funeral ceremonies, and the lengths the family goes to preserve their traditions in spite of the damage it causes to the younger generations.Read More »