Shohei Imamura is one of the greatest directors of Japan, whose films «The Legend of Narayama» (1983) and «The Eel» (1997) won the «Palme d’Or» at Cannes Film Festival. All screenings in Minsk will be presented by Hirosuke Imamura, the director’s youngest son, a member of the Japanese Association of Cinematographers, CEO of «Imamura Production».
Minsk viewers will have a unique opportunity to be the first in the CIS to see such a retrospective. Belarusians will be shown documentary films that have never been shown in wide distribution before: «Soldiers Who Never Returned», «Pirates of Boubouan», «Savage Returns». At the end of the retrospective there will be special screenings of the feature films «Black Rain», which is the winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Technical Commission Prize for Best Picture, and «The Vanishing Man. »
Angelika Krashevskaya, director of the Center for Visual and Performing Arts, noted that «these are not easy pictures, and if people want to watch them, it means we’re going the right way. »
In our country the master became popular 20 years ago. Then on the wide screen came his «The Legend of Naroyama». The queues at the cinemas seemed endless. Igor Soukmanov, program director of Listapad Film Festival, remembers how another cinema started to appear in Belarus after Shohei Imamura’s film: «In 1988 we showed his «Narayama Legend». The Oktyabr cinema has a huge hall with a thousand seats, but still on the first day tickets for all screenings were sold out for a week. The tail from the box office stood as far as the subway entrance! This was the first time our viewers had encountered such frank cinematography, unbiased and shocking. »
The project was organized by the «ART Corporation» with the support of the Ministry of Culture of Belarus and the Embassy of Japan.