Inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Terayama’s final and most elaborate feature film takes place on a remote Okinawan island ruled by a kind of mythical time that gives shifting shape to memory, fantasy and even death. Released shortly after his premature demise at the age of forty-seven and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Farewell to the Ark seems to point towards a new direction in Terayama’s cinema, closer to the international art film with its casting of major stars and slightly more legible narrative structure, here the intergenerational struggles of a dynastic family. Nevertheless, the film brims over with classic Terayama tropes of surreal violence, frustrated sexuality and oneiric, ghostly imagery.