Shohei Imamura Before the Palme d'Or: The Films That Made Him

SHOHEI IMAMURA (1926-2006) is the only Japanese director to win the Palme d'Or twice - for THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (1983) and THE EEL (1997). But those celebrated later films didn't come from nowhere. Imamura started as an assistant to Yasujiro Ozu on TOKYO STORY, and quickly rebelled against everything his mentor stood for: where Ozu found quiet dignity in Japanese family life, Imamura went looking for the mess underneath it - the swindlers, the sex workers, the survivors at the bottom of a rigid social order, filmed with a documentarian's unflinching eye.

• Director: Shohei Imamura (1926-2006)
• Country: Japan
• Awards: THE INSECT WOMAN won the Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film of the Year (1963); star Sachiko Hidari won Kinema Junpo's Best Actress the following year
• Legacy: Imamura remains the only Japanese director to win the Palme d'Or twice

This new boxset collects six of Imamura's early films, from his rarely-seen 1958 debut features through to the three films that established him as a defining voice of the Japanese New Wave.

PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS (1961)

Set around a US naval base in occupation-era Japan, PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS follows a small-time hoodlum drawn into a black-market pig-farming racket that spirals into chaos as the criminal organisation running it tears itself apart. Imamura's camera is everywhere at once - crowded, sweaty, and completely unsentimental about who occupation-era Japan really served.

THE INSECT WOMAN (1963)

The film that established what critics call the "Imamura heroine": a woman who survives poverty and exploitation not through virtue but through sheer, amoral persistence. THE INSECT WOMAN follows its protagonist through decades of scheming, setbacks and reinvention, refusing every convention of how women were "supposed" to be portrayed in Japanese cinema at the time. It remains one of the most radical performances of the era, and it's now part of the Criterion Collection.

INTENTIONS OF MURDER (1964)

A housewife's life under her tyrannical husband is upended after a break-in turns violent - and what follows refuses every easy resolution. Imamura perfects the "Insect Woman" archetype here in epic form: nearly three hours of a woman clawing her way toward some kind of agency in a world designed to deny her any.

The early features: STOLEN DESIRE, NISHI GINZA STATION and ENDLESS DESIRE

Also included on Blu-ray are Imamura's rarely-seen first three films as director, all made in 1958. STOLEN DESIRE follows a travelling kabuki troupe who moonlight in strip shows to make ends meet. NISHI GINZA STATION is Imamura's closest brush with straight comedy - a henpecked pharmacist's flirtation while his family is away, played almost as Japanese screwball. And ENDLESS DESIRE is a black comedy about a group digging up wartime loot, undone by their own greed and incompetence. None of the three had much of a UK release before now - this is a genuine chance to see where Imamura's obsessions started.

Why start here

If you only know Imamura from his two Palme d'Or winners, this set is the missing context - six films that show a director working out, in real time, the themes and heroine archetype he'd spend the rest of his career refining. Presented on 4K UHD and Blu-ray with a 120-page book and newly filmed extras, this is the second instalment in an ongoing series exploring Japan's most groundbreaking filmmakers.

Pre-order RADICAL JAPAN: Six Films by Shohei Imamura now from Terracotta Distribution.