Sing a Song of Sex

Sing a Song of Sex 1967

5.70

Four sexually hungry high school students preparing for their university entrance exams meet up with an inebriated teacher singing bawdy drinking songs. This encounter sets them on a less than academic path.

1967

Japanese Summer: Double Suicide

Japanese Summer: Double Suicide 1967

5.60

A sex-obsessed woman, a suicidal man she meets on the street, and a gun-crazy wannabe gangster become trapped in an underground hideaway.

1967

Death by Hanging

Death by Hanging 1968

7.41

A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but somehow survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next.

1968

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief 1969

4.60

In Tokyo's Shinjuku district, the lives of a young man prone to theft, a young woman he meets at a bookstore, and a kabuki actor intersect.

1969

Boy

Boy 1969

7.33

A family of four lives off of scams in which they pretend to be injured by automobiles.

1969

The Ceremony

The Ceremony 1971

7.03

Oshima’s magisterial epic, centering on the ambivalent surviving heir of the Sakurada clan, uses ritual and the microcosm of the traditional family to trace the rise and fall of militaristic Japan across several decades.

1971

Violence at Noon

Violence at Noon 1966

6.17

Two young women must come to terms with the fact that a man they're deeply linked to is a murdering rapist.

1966

The Man Who Left His Will on Film

The Man Who Left His Will on Film 1970

6.04

A metaphysical mystery involving a university student's camera getting stolen, and the thief then committing suicide.

1970

Band of Ninja

Band of Ninja 1967

5.00

A young boy joins a band of ninja during a peasant uprising, all depicted through an experimental form of filming pages from the original manga set to sound.

1967

Pleasures of the Flesh

Pleasures of the Flesh 1965

5.70

A corrupt businessman blackmails the lovelorn reprobate Atsushi into watching over his suitcase full of embezzled cash while he serves a jail sentence.

1965

Dear Summer Sister

Dear Summer Sister 1972

4.30

14-year-old Sunaoko travels from Tokyo to Naha, Okinawa, with her father’s young fiancée Momoko in search of her half-brother whom she has never met. Their guide, a beer-guzzling ex-soldier, takes them to the locale’s tourist attractions, quickly delving into the underlying scars of the island’s wartime history.

1972

Diary of Yunbogi

Diary of Yunbogi 1965

6.10

This ethereal montage of still images with darkly somber undertones, Yunbogi’s Diary is based on photographs that Oshima took during his two-month research trip to South Korea in 1965 during which he was haunted by his encounters with impoverished street children in Seoul. The voice-over comprises diary entries from a six-year-old Korean boy and Oshima’s own reflections on Japanese-Korean relations, a controversial subject that he revisited in his later films Sing a Song of Sex and Death by Hanging.

1965

Three Resurrected Drunkards

Three Resurrected Drunkards 1968

5.50

Three students spend their holidays at the seaside where they are mistaken for Koreans, a minority which is looked down on in Japan. The action develops into a crime story.

1968

The Dawn of Asia

The Dawn of Asia 1964

1

The Dawn of Asia (アジアの曙) is a TV drama consisting of thirteen episodes about the trans-China/Japan collaboration of revolutionaries in the early twentieth century. It was Nagisa Oshima’s rare attempt to direct a TV drama in a social atmosphere in which Japan was embracing postwar prosperity as well as the effects of permeating mass media. Making an effort to reach out to the mass audience through a seemingly conventional method of filmic representation, Dawn of Asia takes up the epic of trans-Asiatic solidarity while challenging nationalism on both sides.

1964