Sunna no onna - The woman in the dunes (Teshigahara, 1964)

An insect collector is lured into a sand dune where the locals decide to keep him imprisoned.

A wonderful story and it's amazing how this works in this extremely confined space of the dunes. As the two inhabitants of the dune turn against and then for each other I was easily swayed back and forth with feeling sorry for the woman for not having any other opportunity to exist and the then again for the man for being trapped down there. The female character is endlessly kind and the man is rather brutal, ignorant and selfish - I didn't think that the man already changed the attitude towards the woman at the end of the movie, but one could definitively see the ground shift, he was standing on.

The shots of the sand dunes are amazing and they took on very different meanings throughout the movie.

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