The Woman in the Dunes

Woman in the Dunes or Woman of the Dunes (Japanese: 砂の女, Hepburn: Suna No Onna; "Sand Woman") is a 1964 Japanese drama film directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara and starring Eiji Okada, Kyōko Kishida, and Kōji Mitsui. Associated with the Japanese New Wave, it received widespread critical acclaim and was nominated for two Academy Awards. The screenplay for the film was adapted by Kōbō Abe from his 1962 novel of the same name. The film follows an amateur entomologist (Okada) who is led to settle in the house of a lonely widow (Kishida) at the bottom of a sand dune in a rural coastal village. He soon realizes that the villagers have trapped him there and expect him to work for them. Woman in the Dunes was an independent, joint production of Teshigahara Productions and the Japanese Art Theater Guild, a group of young filmmakers involved in an attempt to create political–aesthetical films in opposition to the dominant studio productions of the 1960s, which they viewed as commercial, unartistic, and uninteresting. The film is considered to be Teshigahara's masterpiece and one of the best movies of Japanese cinema, the 1960s and the 20th century, and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. It is also seen as one of the most ambiguous, cryptic and enigmatic movies ever made.