His screenplays were filmed by directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi, Kōzaburō Yoshimura, Kon Ichikawa, Keisuke Kinoshita, Seijun Suzuki, and Tadashi Imai.

His films of the first decade were often in a social realist vein, repeatedly depicting the fate of women, while since the seventies, portraits of artists became a speciality.

[7] Shindō discovered that a lot of people wanted to become film directors, including Mizutani, and he decided that he might have a better chance of success as a screenwriter.

[1] At the surrender of Japan, Shindō exchanged his uniform for cigarettes and made his way back to the Shochiku film studio at Ōfuna.

[citation needed] In 1946, with a secure job as a scriptwriter at Shochiku, he married Miyo Shindō via an arranged marriage, and bought a house in Zushi, intending to start a family.

[4] In 1950 they both left to form an independent production company with actor Taiji Tonoyama, Kindai Eiga Kyokai, which went on to produce most of Shindō's films.

[1] After directing Avalanche in 1952, Shindō was invited by the Japan Teachers Union to make a film about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

"[4] Between 1953 and 1959 Shindō continued to make political films that were social critiques of poverty and women's suffering in present-day Japan.

These included Life of a Woman, an adaptation of Maupassant's Une Vie in 1953, and Dobu, a 1954 film about the struggles of unskilled workers and petty thieves that starred Otowa as a tragic prostitute.

Wolf (1955), based on an actual event of a money transport robbed by a group of men and women out of sheer desperation, failed due to its extremely limited release.

These included actors Nobuko Otowa, Taiji Tonoyama and Jūkichi Uno, composer Hikaru Hayashi and cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda,[4] who had been fired from the Toei studio for his political beliefs during the "red purge" of the early 1950s, and lost a legal battle for reinstatement.

[1] With Kindai Eiga Kyokai close to bankruptcy, Shindō poured what little financial resources he had left into The Naked Island, a film without dialogue which he described as "a cinematic poem to try and capture the life of human beings struggling like ants against the forces of nature.

Onibaba stars Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura as 14th-century Japanese peasant women living in a reed-filled marshland who survive by killing and robbing defeated samurai.

After the 1965 jidaigeki drama Akuto, based on a play by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Shindō continued his exploration of human sexuality with Lost Sex in 1966.

In Lost Sex, a middle aged man who has become temporarily impotent after the Hiroshima bombing in 1945, once again loses his virility due to nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll.

Tadao Sato said "By contrasting the comical weakness of the male with the unbridled strength of the female, Shindō seemed to be saying in the 1960s that women had wrought their revenge.

After being raped and left to die in their burning hut by a group of soldiers, the pair return as demons who entice samurai into a bamboo grove, where they are killed.

[18] Also in 1972, he directed Sanka about a shamisen player and her submissive apprentice, his second adaptation of a literary source by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki after Akuto.

Based on a true story, an elderly woman resiliently spends nine months attempting to retrieve her husband's dead body, fighting government bureaucracy and indifference all along the way.

Edo Porn, another film based on an artist's biography released in 1981, portrayed the life of the 18th-century Japanese wood engraver Katsushika Hokusai.

The film chronicles her experiences as a poor farm girl who is sold as a mail-order bride to a Japanese American and never sees her family again.

She spends time in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II and lives a life of difficulty and disappointment.

[4] With the 1988 semi-documentary Sakura-tai Chiru, Shindō once again returned to the theme of nuclear weapons and their consequences, following the fate of a theater troupe whose members were killed during the bombing of Hiroshima.

The 2003 Owl, again starring Otake, used as a background the true story of farmers sent back from Japanese colonies in Manchuria to unworkable farmland at the end of the Second World War.

[10] It was entered into the 25th Moscow International Film Festival, where Shindō won a special award for his contribution to world cinema.

Postcard was selected as the Japanese submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film,[23] but did not make the January shortlist.

[26] This event included screenings of most of his films and special guests such as Shindō himself and longtime admirer Benicio del Toro.

"[4] The strongest and most apparent themes in Shindō's work (who described himself as a "socialist") involve social criticism of poverty, women and sexuality.

His radical perception isolates man's sexual life in the context of his role as a member of a specific social class...For Shindo our passions as biological beings and our ambitions as members of social classes, which give specific and distorted form to those drives, induce an endless struggle within the unconscious.

Those moments in his films when this warfare is visualized and brought to conscious life raise his work to the level of the highest art.