Everyday Desire: The Films of Shohei Imamura

Adrian Danks, Associate Professor at RMIT University and Co-curator and President of the Melbourne Cinémathèque, will chart Imamura’s movement from the youth cycle of the early 1960s to his work’s increasing preoccupation with the resilience and place of women in Japanese society in such landmark films as Insect Woman and The Ballad of Narayama.

The talk will also examine the director’s anthropological and often primal approach to filmmaking which forges together fiction and documentary and highlights aspects of Japanese life and society that persist in the face of wide-scale modernisation and westernisation.