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The Profound Desire of the Gods
(Kamigami no fukaki yokubo)

Directed by Shohei Imamura.
With Rentaro Mikuni, Choichiro Kawarazaki, Kazuo Kitamura.
Japan, 1968, 35mm, color, 170 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: Japan Foundation

Imamura as anthropologist comes to the fore in this epic tale of the primal past subsisting within the modern world. An engineer from Tokyo is sent to a tropical island where he encounters a strange family ostracized for its incestuous practices. Although life on the island seems primitive to the engineer, he also finds it strangely alluring. The film imagines a confrontation between technology and tradition in which technology only appears to win, with the irrational always close at hand as a counterweight to progress.

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