Profound Desires of the Gods
1968 film by Shōhei Imamura
Profound Desires of the Gods or Deep Desires of Gods or Kuragejima – Legends from a Southern Island (Japanese: 神々の深き欲望, Hepburn: Kamigami no Fukaki Yokubō) is a 1968 Japanese film by director Shōhei Imamura. The culmination of the director's examinations of the fringes of Japanese society throughout the 1960s, the film was an 18-month super-production which failed to make an impression at the time of its release, but has since risen in stature.
Plot
Presenting a vast chronicle of life on the remote Kurage Island, the film centres on the disgraced, superstitious, inbred Futori family and the Tokyo engineer sent to supervise the creation of a new well for a sugar mill on the island – an encounter which leads to both conflict and complicity in strange and powerful ways.
Cast
Source:
Kazuo Kitamura as Engineer Kariya, a modern-day married man from Tokyo who gets entangled in the Futori family. Kariya is sent to Kurage Island by his boss at the sugar cane corporation to find a water source for a sugar mill on the island. Eventually he is seduced by Toriko.
Kanjūrō Arashi as Yamamori Futori, the patriarch of the Futori family.
Rentarō Mikuni as Nekichi Futori, Yamamori's son conceived through an incestuous relationship between Yamamori and a deceased older sister. He lusts after his sister Uma. Disfavored and condemned, his punishment is being chained in a pit beneath a boulder and tasked to loosen it in order to appease the island gods.
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