Japan’s Oscar-Nominated Hiroshi Teshigahara Set for San Sebastian Retrospective
variety.comJohn Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Japan’s Hiroshi Teshigahara, who seemed on track for greatness after winning two Oscar nominations for “Woman in the Sands,” will be the subject of a San Sebastian Festival retrospective.
Nominated for best foreign-language film in 1964, and winning Teshigahara a best director Academy Award nomination a year later, “Woman in the Sands” was just Teshigahara’s second feature, a social and erotic allegory which yoked the political convictions of Teshigahara and screenwriter Kobo Abe, both members of Japan’s communist party in their youth, with Abe’s penchant for the darkly surreal.
Turning on an entomologist from Tokyo who discovers a young widow living at the bottom of an enormous sandpit on a deserted beach, it also won a Cannes Special Jury prize.
Hailed as a masterpiece, and building on 1961’s “The Pitfall,” a political allegory which won Teshigahara fans, with Abe adapting his TV play, it looked like Teshigahara would find a niche on the same pantheon as contemporaries Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura.
Read more on variety.com