Nagisa Oshima was born on March 31, 1932, in Kyoto, the son of a samurai engineer. Having lost his father early, he was forced to earn a living on his own. In April 1950, Oshima enrolled at Kyoto University Law School, where he became interested in baseball, theater and became a student activist, earning the nickname "red student." After graduating from the university, Oshima, together with several comrades in the student theater, passed a difficult exam and in April 1954 was admitted to the department
more
Nagisa Oshima was born on March 31, 1932, in Kyoto, the son of a samurai engineer. Having lost his father early, he was forced to earn a living on his own. In April 1950, Oshima enrolled at Kyoto University Law School, where he became interested in baseball, theater and became a student activist, earning the nickname "red student." After graduating from the university, Oshima, together with several comrades in the student theater, passed a difficult exam and in April 1954 was admitted to the department of assistants of the studio "Ofuna" of the company "Shochiku". In 1956, together with film critic Tadao Sato, he founded the journal Eiga Hihyo (Cinema Criticism). When the company fell into financial crisis in the late 1950s, its producer, Shiro Kido, allowed several assistants to make films on their own, including Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura, Yoshishige Yoshida, and Masahiro Shinoda – their work was later called the “new wave of ‘Ofuna’.” His debut film was The Street of Love and Hope (1959). His next films, The Story of a Cruel Youth and The Cemetery of the Sun, made him the leader of a new generation of directors. After a conflict with the management of the studio, removed from the show of his "Night and fog of Japan", Nagisa Oshima left "Syochika" and in the fall of 1960 created his own company - "Shozosha". On it, he staged a number of films, which were characterized by the search for new possibilities of the film language – “The Demon Arising in the Middle of the Day” (1966), “Military Art of Ninja. Album” (1967), “Investigation of Obscene Songs of Japan” (1967), “Joint Suicide of Lovers – Japanese Summer” (1968), “The Return of Three Drinkers” (1968), “Diary of a Thief from Shinjuku” (1969), “The Story Told after the Tokyo War” (1970). The film “Death Penalty by Hanging” (1968) showed at the Cannes Film Festival made the director’s name known to the world film community. Since the second half of the 1970s, Nagisa Oshima began to create films in collaboration with European filmmakers - he put the infamous films "The Corridor of Love" ("Empire of the Senses", 1976) and "Ghosts of Love" ("Grey Empire", 1978), awarded several prestigious prizes, as well as the tape "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence!" (1983), in which the main roles were performed by David Bowie and Takeshi Kitano. In 1986, in France, the director directed the black comedy Max, My Love. After a long break in 1999, he directed the film Taboo. In addition, Nagisa Oshima works a lot in television, makes documentaries, writes books.