TOKYO, May 30: Director Shohei Imamura, who portrayed modern Japan’s downtrodden in raw realism and eroticism and became the first Japanese to win the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes twice, died of cancer here on Tuesday. He was 79.
Often considered the top Japanese director since the late Akira Kurosawa, Imamura was a pioneer of the country’s New Wave movement, moving away from classical themes to focus on prostitutes, ex-convicts and other characters from the underground.
“He died at a hospital where he had been treated for about a month since he fell ill,” said Mitsuo Hirakawa, chief secretary of the Japan Academy of Moving Images, which Imamura founded in 1975.
“Mr Imamura seemed healthy and cheerful when he attended a party with our faculty last March,” he said, adding that he had not known of any plan by the director to shoot a new film.
The cause of death was a metastatic liver tumor resulting from cancer for which he underwent surgery in June last year, Imamura Studio said.
Imamura won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1983 for the “The Ballad of Narayama,” a tale of a man who follows village tradition to let his mother die on a mountain top.
He won the top award again in 1997 for ‘The Eel’, about a man who was imprisoned for murdering his wife and meets another woman as he tries to start a new quiet life in a village.—AFP
