About

Part parable, part erotic nightmare, Woman in the Dunes is a singular masterwork that has beguiled audiences for more than half a century. Teacher and amateur entomologist Niki Junpei takes himself on a trip to collect a special kind of beetle from sand dunes in a remote part of Japan. When he misses the bus home, the local villagers offer him accommodation in a house within a deep sand quarry. In the house lives an unnamed, widowed woman who is employed by the villagers to dig for sand they can use for concrete. The next morning, however, he discovers that the ladder used to lower him into the quarry has now disappeared - and the villagers expect him to stay and marry the woman in the dunes. His relationship with the woman grows increasingly strange and tortured as his time isolated from the world rolls on endlessly.

Winner of the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for two Academy Awards, Woman in the Dunes was a cinematic sensation upon its release. In the intervening years, it has lost none of its psychological and emotional power. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara films the sand in great rippling waves, filling the screen and immersing the audience in the treacherous, infinite landscape.

M | Mature themes, sexual violence and nudity