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Shohei Imamura
Life Time
15 September 1926 - 30 May 2006
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Sohei Imamura was born on September 15, 1926 in Tokyo, Japan, in the family of a doctor. After graduating from an elite school - after which graduates usually enter prestigious universities and then pursue a career in government or business spheres - he failed to pass the exams for the agricultural department of the National University of Hokkaido and, to avoid conscription, enrolled in a technical school. In 1945, after the end of World War II, Sohei Imamura left technical school and entered Waseda
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Sohei Imamura was born on September 15, 1926 in Tokyo, Japan, in the family of a doctor. After graduating from an elite school - after which graduates usually enter prestigious universities and then pursue a career in government or business spheres - he failed to pass the exams for the agricultural department of the National University of Hokkaido and, to avoid conscription, enrolled in a technical school. In 1945, after the end of World War II, Sohei Imamura left technical school and entered Waseda University, the Department of Literature. While studying at the university, he began writing plays, played in student productions with Seichi Ozawa, Kazuo Kitamura, Takeshi Kato - later he will shoot them in his films. After graduating from the university in 1951, Imamura entered the studio of "Ofuna" film company "Setoku", where he worked as an assistant director, including Yasujiro Ozu. In 1954 he moved to Nikkatsu Studios. His first film, “Stolen Desire”, the director put in 1958 and in the same year shot the film “In front of the station “West Ginza” and “Infinite Desire”, the heroes of which were broken by the war young people. For the best debut of the year, he was awarded the Blue Ribbon Award. His anti-American film Pigs and Battleships (1961) combined documentary with complex symbolism. In the 1960s, the director moved from social and political issues to the study of strong female characters unusual for Japanese cinema. Imamura's first significant success was the film Insect Woman (1963), and he continued to explore the female theme in the films Red Thirst for Murder (1964), Postwar History of Japan: The Life of Madame Onborough (1970). In 1965, he founded his own film company, Imamura Pro, which marked the beginning of independent cinema in Japan. In 1968, the director turned to color, putting his first color picture "Deep thirst for the gods." In the 1970s, Sohei Imamura worked on television, filming documentaries, returning to the feature film in 1979 with the film about the serial killer Az Vozdam (I Am the Avenger). In 1975, he founded the Yokohama Television Film Institute, which he still directs. The broadest international fame was the historical and philosophical film parable of Imamura “The Legend of Narayama” (1983), marked by the Grand Prix of the Cannes Festival. In the film Black Rain (1989), awarded the Grand Prize of the Higher Technical Commission in Cannes, the theme of the nuclear catastrophe sounds. The theme of “karayuki” – Japanese women abandoned on the islands of Southeast Asia during the Second World War – the director again turned in 1987 – the film “Zegen” (“Svodnya”). Black humor is imbued with an unusual love story “Unagi” (“Eel”), staged by Imamura in 1997 and received the Golden Palm Branch of the Cannes Film Festival. He later directed Doctor Akagi (1998) and Warm Water Under the Red Bridge (2001).