*1926, Tokyo, Japan 

Shohei Imamura's films graven onder de oppervlakte van de Japanese society to reveal a wellspring of sensual, often irrational, energy that lies beneath. Along with his colleagues Nagisa Oshima and Masahiro Shinoda, Imamura began his serious directorial career as a member of the New Wave movement in Japan. Reacting against the studio system, and particularly against the style of Yasujiro Ozu, the director he first assisted, Imamura moved away from the subtlety and understated nature of the classical masters to a celebration of the primitive and spontaneous aspects of Japanese life. To explore this level of Japanese consciousness, Imamura focuses on the lower classes, with characters who range from bovine housewives to shamans, and from producers of blue movies to troupes of third-rate traveling actors. He has proven himself unafraid to explore themes usually considered taboo, particularly those of incest and superstition.

Imamura  was zelf niet geboren in een soort lagere klasse not born into the kind of lower-class society he depicts. The college-educated son of a physician, he was drawn toward film, and particularly toward the kinds of films he would eventually make, by his love of the avant-garde theater.

Imamura has worked as a documentarist, recording the statements of Japanese who remained in other parts of Asia after the end of WWII, and of the "karayuki-san"—Japanese women sent to accompany the army as prostitutes during the war period.

His heroines tend to be remarkably strong and resilient, able to outlast, and even to combat, the exploitative situations in which they find themselves. This is a stance that would have seemed impossible for the long-suffering heroines of classical Japanese films.

In 1983, Imamura won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival for Narayama Bushiko/The Ballad of Narayama, based on a Fukazawa novel about a village where the elderly are abandoned on a sacred mountaintop to die. Unlike director Keisuke Kinoshita's earlier version of the same story, Imamura's film, shot on location in a remote mountain village, highlights the more disturbing aspects of the tale through its harsh realism.

In his attempt to capture what is real in Japanese society, and what it means to be Japanese, Imamura used an actual 40-year-old former prostitute in his Nippon Konchuki/The Insect Woman (1963); a woman who was searching for her missing fiance in Ningen johatsu/A Man Vanishes (1967); and a non-actress bar hostess as the protagonist of his Nippon Sengoshi: Madamu Onboro no seikatsu/History of Postwar Japan As Told By a Bar Hostess (1974). Despite this anthropological bent, Imamura has cleverly mixed the real with the fictional, even within what seems to be a documentary. This is most notable in his A Man Vanishes, in which the fiancée becomes more interested in an actor playing in the film than with her missing lover.

In a time when the word "Japanese" is often considered synonymous with "coldly efficient", Imamura's vision of a more robust and intuitive Japanese character adds an especially welcome cinematic dimension.

Filmography Shohei Imamura

1951   EARLY SUMMER/BAKUSHU         assistant director

1952   THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE/OCHAZUKE NO AJI/TEA AND RICE            assistant director

1953   TOKYO STORY/TOKYO MONOGATARI         ass. director

1954   KUROI USHIO          assistant director

1955   TSUKIWA NOBORINU                  assistant director

1956   FUSEN                   screenwriter

1958   BAKUMATSU TAIYODEN         screenwriter

1958   HATESHINAKI YOKUBO         director, screenwriter

1958   NISHI-GINZA EKI MAE             director, screenwriter

1958   NUSUMARETA YOKUJO         director

1959   JIGOKU NO MAGARIKAGO         screenwriter

1959   NIANCHAN                      director, screenwriter

1961   BUTA TO GUNKAN            director, screenwriter

1962   KYUPORA NO ARU MACHI         screenwriter

1963  THE INSECT WOMAN / NIPPON KONCHUKI  director, screenwriter

1963  SAMURAI NO KO                screenwriter

1964  AKAI SATSUI                  director, screenwriter

1964  KEIRIN SHONIN GYOJOKI         screenwriter

1966      THE PORNOGRAPHERS

JINRUIGAKU NYUMON: EROGOTSHI YORI            producer, director, screenwriter

1967  A MAN VANISHES/NINGEN JOHATSU          producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1967   NEON TAIHEIKI-KEIEIGAKU NYUMON                screenwriter

1968   HIGASHI SHINAKI             screenwriter, story

1968   KAMIGAMI NO FUKAKI YOKUBO                                    producer, director, screenwriter, story

1974   HISTORY OF POSTWAR JAPAN AS TOLD BY A BAR HOSTESS                                          NIPPON SENGOSHI: MADAM ONBORO NO SEIKATSU         director, screenwriter, performer

1979   VENGEANCE IS MINE/FUKUSHU SURUWA WARE NI ARI         director

1981    EIJANAIKA                       director, screenwriter, story

1983   THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA/NARAYAMA BUSHIKO         director, screenwriter

1987   YUKI YUKITE SHINGUN                               idea

1987   ZEGEN                            director, screenwriter

1989   BLACK RAIN (JAPAN)         executive producer, director