In the Realm of the Senses (French: L'Empire des sens, Japanese: 愛のコリーダ, Ai no Korīda, "Bullfight of Love"[1]) is a 1976 erotic art film written and directed by Nagisa Ōshima.

[5] While intended for mainstream wide release, the film contains scenes of unsimulated sexual activity between the actors (Eiko Matsuda and Tatsuya Fuji, among others).

The hotel's owner, Kichizo Ishida, initiates an intense affair that consists of sexual experiments and various self-indulgences.

The film explores themes of sexual obsession, power dynamics, and the blurred lines between violence and love, representing extreme consequences of resistance to social repression.

[4] This obstruction was bypassed by officially listing the production as a French enterprise, and the undeveloped footage was shipped to France for processing and editing.

"[12] Ōshima and the publisher were found not guilty in 1979; the government appealed and the Tokyo High Court upheld the verdict in 1982.

[23][24] The film is available in uncut form in France, Germany, the United States (as part of The Criterion Collection), the Netherlands, Belgium and several other territories.

[25] Due to its sexual themes and explicit scenes, the film was the cause of great controversy in Portugal in 1991 after it aired on RTP.

"[33] In 2012 Sight and Sound wrote: "Thirty-six years on, In the Realm of the Senses is still startlingly confrontational, the unambiguously unsimulated sex scenes staged with an acute awareness of their participants' inner psychology in a way that conventional porn doesn't just omit but actively shuns.

At a time (the mid-1930s) when Japanese foreign policy was becoming aggressively externalised, the lovers Sada and Kichi try to achieve both total privacy and perfect sexual fusion, constantly under the scrutiny of numerous onscreen voyeurs and, even when ostensibly closeted away from prying eyes, the film's own audience.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Sexual taboos are broken and boundaries crossed In the Realm of the Senses, a fearlessly provocative psychosexual tale.