The Ballad of Narayama

Director: Shôhei Imamura

1983 / 130min / DCP

Based on a Japanese folk legend, Imamura’s kabuki-inspired period piece takes place in a desolate mountain village where, due to the scarcity of resources, tradition demands that locals, on reaching their 70th year, must be carried to the peak of Mount Narayama and left to die—a tradition that Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata) begins to question in the months before he’s tasked with doing the deed to his own mother (Sumiko Sakamoto, in a performance of sublime simplicity). A brilliantly bawdy peasant burlesque, and one of the finest Japanese films of the 1980s. “Cruel and exalting.”—The New York Times