Woman in the Dunes

Part of the Hanabi Film Festival, running select days Aug. 18 – 31. Limited festival passes available for access to all films.

Starting our Hanabi Film Festival is one of the great international art-house sensations.

Adapted by Kōbō Abe from his 1962 novel of the same name, Eiji Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert. When he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most bristling, unnerving, and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday Sisyphean struggle anchored by a haunting score from Tōru Takemitsu.

Hiroshi Teshigahara is the first person of Asian descent to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director, and his masterpiece has been hailed by everyone from Andrei Tarkovsky to Roger Ebert as one of the greatest films of all time.

Screened in Japanese with English subtitles.