Woman in the Dunes

One of the great international art-house sensations of the 1960s, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s WOMAN IN THE DUNES remains a hypnotic, unsettling vision of desire, captivity, and endless labor. Eiji Okada stars as an amateur entomologist who misses his bus home after a day collecting insects in a remote stretch of dunes and is persuaded to spend the night with a young widow, played by Kyoko Kishida, who lives at the bottom of a vast sand pit.

By morning, escape is no longer so simple. Forced into the relentless work of shoveling back the encroaching sand, the two become locked in an increasingly intimate struggle over freedom, obligation, survival, and desire. Sensual, surreal, and nightmarishly repetitive, WOMAN IN THE DUNES transforms everyday labor into something elemental and inescapable.

Part of Her Work is Never Done.