Profound Desires of the Gods

Profound Desires of the Gods or Deep Desires of Gods or Kuragejima – Legends from a Southern Island (神々の深き欲望, Kamigami no Fukaki Yokubō) is a 1968 Japanese film by director Shohei Imamura.

The culmination of the director's examinations of the fringes of Japanese society throughout the 1960s, the film was an 18-month super-production which failed to make an impression at the time of its release, but has since risen in stature.

Presenting a vast chronicle of life on the remote Kurage Island, the film centres on the disgraced, superstitious, interbred Futori family and the Tokyo engineer sent to supervise the creation of a new well for a sugar mill on the island – an encounter which leads to both conflict and complicity in strange and powerful ways.

[1] The film was Japan's submission to the 42nd Academy Awards for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but was not accepted as a nominee.

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