The Naked Island (Hadaka no Shima)

Written and directed by Kaneto Shindo

Starring Nobuko Otowa, Taiji Tonoyama, Masanori Horimoto, Shinji Tanaka

Without dialogue, The Naked Island tells the story of a poor rural couple living with their two children on a small, uninhabited island in Japan's Inland Sea.  As farmers, they work the arid land which has no water supply of its own.  For life-giving fresh water, they must row twice a day to a neighboring island and then walk their buckets up the steep hillsides.  The family's daily chores, captured as a series of cyclical events amid nature, are contrasted by an outing to a mainland city and a family crisis.  The result is a hypnotizing, moving and beautiful film that harkens back to the silent era.

Kaneto Shindo began his career as an assistant art director in 1934.  He then worked exclusively as a screenwriter until the early 1950's, writing well-regarded scripts for directors Kinoshita, Ichikawa, Yoshimura, Hisamatsu, Imai, and Mizoguchi, for whom Shindo also worked as chief assistant director.  Left-wing, socially and politically conscious filmmakers like Shindo were forced out and blacklisted from the major studios during the U.S. occupation.  Shindo decided to form his own independent production company in 1951.  His critically acclaimed work took on the consequences of the atomic bombings, as well as the roles of women and the maltreatment of the disabled in Japanese society.  Shindo went on to a long career as a writer and director.  The Naked Island, made as a go-for-broke gamble for his then faltering company, went on to great acclaim, winning the Grand Prix at the Moscow International Film Festival.  Shindo is best known in the west for Onibaba and Kuroneko, a pair of erotically charged period horror films from the 1960's that explore themes of disfigurement and dehumanization brought about by war and social breakdown.

For this project, AJE collaborated with guest artists One World Taiko (Gary Tsujimoto and Nancy Ozaki) and sound artist David Knott, who created a number of soundboards especially for the NWFF theatre space.