Ken Ogata

In a Japanese village, everyone who reaches the age of 70 has to climb a mountain to die...

For the centenary of Yukio Mishima’s birth, we’re revisiting one of cinema’s greatest experiments in biopic form. Drawing from the Japanese iconoclast’s life and art, director Paul Schrader harmonizes a series of fractured sketches into a ravishing, expressionist elegy for violent transcendence.

Throughout the 1980s, Shohei Imamura (The Pornographers, Profound Desires of the Gods), a leading figure of the Japanese New Wave era of the 1960s, cemented his international reputation as one of the most important directors of his generation with a series of films that all competed at Cannes to great critical acclaim. Making its HD debut, Zegen (1987) takes a satirical look at Japan's pre-war colonial expansion through the unscrupulous eyes of its flesh-peddler antihero as he establishes a prostitution enterprise across Southeast Asia. This work epitomises the director's almost documentary style of filmmaking, exposing the vulgar yet vibrant and instinctive underbelly of Japanese society through a sympathetic focus on peasants, prostitutes, criminal lowlife and other marginalised figures to explore the schism between the country's timeless pre-modern traditions and the modern face it projects to the world.