Kiga kaikyo

Guilt and reparation: Two questions that affected the whole of Japan after World War Two are brought together by Uchida in his protagonist Takichi Inukai. During the chaos of a typhoon, Takichi is drawn into a robbery and murder. The stolen money ends up in his hands but he knows the police will not believe his innocence. He becomes an object of obsession: to a prostitute to whom he gives some of the money, and to a police officer who struggles to solve the mysterious case. Many years later, that obsession finally reaches its climax. Uchida casts a sharp look on the massive upheaval experienced in post-war Japan, dissecting the societal breakdown and treatment of marginalized individuals. KIGA KAIKYO was shot on 16-mm film and blown up to 35 mm in order to achieve the grainy, unmediated effect of the imagery. Certain scenes that use a solarization effect appear almost like negative images, revealing the repressed and the uncanny.

Tomu Uchida (1898–1970) is among the directors whose work never achieved real recognition in the West, despite his great popularity in Japan. A socially conscious filmmaker who was nonetheless not without contradictions and ambiguities, Uchida worked across a broad variety of genres, creating films of great thematic and stylistic diversity from the mid-1920s until his death, making him more difficult for Western audiences to categorize in comparison to contemporaries such as Ozu and Mizoguchi.