Exclusive Japanese movies to be shown in Minsk

On April 3-6, 2012 Visual and Performing Arts Centre together with JTI Company with the assistance of Embassy of Japan in the Republic of Belarus will carry out a unique project – an exclusive program of documentaries by classic Japanese film director Shōhei Imamura.

Within the project 6 documentaries by Shōhei Imamura will be presented in “Tsentralny” cinema.
In addition a special screening of a feature film “Black rain” will be organized within the program.

Hirosuke Imamura, a son of famous film director, will come to Minsk to present the films.

The program will comprise the following titles:

April 3, 2012 18.30
A Man Vanishes /Ningen Johatsu (1967)
Running time: 130 min (2 h 10 min) (black and white)

This film combines documentary and fiction. Hidden camera shoots a real woman searching for her disappeared fiancé. The detective who helps her is an actor. The film caused polemics about the boundaries in the cinematography.

April 4, 2012 19.00
In Search of The Unreturned Soldiers in Malaysia / Mikahei o otte (1971)
In Search of The Unreturned Soldiers in Thailand /Mikahei o otte N°2 (1971)
Running time: 47 min (film1) + 47 min (film 2)

This film is about soldiers who deserted from the Imperial Army in the end of World War II and remained in secret within the territory of Malaysia and Thailand. As of the time of film shooting many of them didn’t even know that the war had been over.

April 5, 2012 19.00
Muhomatsu returns home/Muhomatsu kokyo e kaeru (1973)
Running time: 50 min (colour)

The last part of the trilogy about unreturned soldiers.
Three years after the interview of former Japanese soldiers established in Thailand, Imamura invites to come in Japan, one of those men, Fuijta, “the hard imperialist”.


The Pirates of Bubuan / Bubuan no kaizoku (1972)
Running time 47: min (colour)

By going to the Philippines, Imamura comes to meet people living in an extreme poverty. He discovers very quickly that some communities are under the control of cruel & armed pirates.
Imamura will come to meet those men in order to understand their position.



April 6, 2012 19.00
Karayuki san, the Making of a Prostitute / Karayuki san (1975)
Running time: 70 min (1 h 10 min) (colour)

At the beginning of the century, there were around 2000 Japanese prostitutes in the south Asian countries. This time corresponds to the industrial development in Japan toward these countries. Considered as some “exported Japanese product”, those women brought back few hundred millions of yen to Japan. Most of those women, from humble families, were kidnapped and forced to work in miserable conditions. Imamura interviewed one survivor, Kikuyo, 73 years old in order to understand her itinerary.


April 6, 2012 20.30
Special screening
Black rain/ Kuroi Ame (1989)
Running time: 123 minutes (black and white)

The film moves between Shizuma Shigematsu's journal entries about Hiroshima in 1945, following the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the present, 1950, when Shigematsu and his wife Shigeko are the guardians for their niece Yasuko and charged with finding her a husband (she has been declined three times due to concerns over her having been in the "black rain" fallout). As the story progresses, Shigematsu sees more and more fellow hibakusha, his friends and family, succumbing to radiation sickness and Yasuko's prospects for marriage become more and more unlikely, as she forms a bond with a poor man named Yuichi, who carves jizo and suffers a form of post-traumatic stress disorder where he attacks passing motor vehicles as "tanks."

About the director

Shōhei Imamura – film director and producer (September 15, 1926, Tokyo – May 30, 2006, Tokyo)

One of the greatest postwar film directors in Japan famous by the movies exposing sexual and sensual human nature through the perspective of lower classes. The only Japanese director who received two Palmes d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (The Ballad of Narayama, 1983 and The Eel, 1996). Worked in advertising, independent film industry; the author of series of documentaries shot on demand of Japanese TV. Founder of the first specialized film school in Japan. Shōhei Imamura considered himself more as an anthropologist than an artist. “I’m interested in the connections between the lower half of human body and the lowest level of social structure of society on witch everyday life in Japan is based.”