Retrospective of Nagisa Oshima

Nagisa Ōshima

Late Nagisa Oshima, the Japanese director and screen writer, is regarded as the pioneer of the new wave Japanese Cinema. Oshima began his career in the late 1950s with the contemporary use of cinema and television to express the paradoxes in modern society.

As a film maker he is globally praised for his movies which conveyed the surreal facts of the changing world. Most of his films are carved from real life persons.

Five of Nagisa Oshima’s films are included in the 16th IFFK.

The Street of Love (1959)

Sun’s Burial (1960),

Sing a Song of Sex (1967),

Sinner in Paradise (1968) and

Boy (1969) are the movies in the Retrospective package of Nagisa Oshima.

The 62-minute-long,

The Street of Love is a story of a young boy Maosao who sells his sister’s young pigeon for daily bread. The boy wants the sold birds to return home so that he can sell them over and over again. The struggle to satisfy the ambitions of the poor and the supremacy of the wealthy are portrayed in this movie.

Boy which was commented as “a key film in the struggle for a modern political cinema” by The Time Out London. The 105-minute-long film is based on a true story. Boy delineates a family who risks their son’s life by having him pretend to be hit by cars so that they can extort money from the drivers. Haunting failures of a patriarchal society can be seen in this film.

Sing a Song of Sex is a crime thriller. The movie portrays the irresponsible youth of the post-war Japan. Four young men spend their time in carousing, drinking and prostitution, In the midst of their joy the film steers to successively shocking and surreal realms.

Sinner in Paradise is an 80-minute-long movie which narrates about three friends who come to a beach to spend their holidays. They are mistaken there for Koreans, a minority which is looked down on in Japan. Sinner in Paradise is an exhilarating crime tale which can take the spectators to a thorn of anguish.

Sun’s Burial narrates the slums of the post war Osaka. The disenfranchised find themselves eking out an existence through any available means. Through this movie Oshima depicts the land of rising sun’s loss of national, cultural, and spiritual identity.

Nagisa Oshima’s films tend to expose contemporary Japanese materialism in the face of rapid industrialisation and westernisation. His films were included in the retrospective section at the Bergamo film festival - 1984, Turin film festival - 2009 in Italy and in the 5th IFFK (2000).