Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, awarded the Grand Prize (the Golden Palm) at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, is a majestic and deeply felt retelling of a classic Japanese folk tale. For Imamura, whose films include The Insect Woman and The Profound Desire of the Gods, the legend of Narayama provides yet another backdrop for a continuing exploration of Japan's primordial past--and, by extension, its civilized present. Here he recreates in exquisite detail a remote society whose values--alternately harsh and gentle, like nature itself--make us question our own. Narayama is the mountain where, custom has it, the elderly from nearby villages are left to die in order to make room for a new generation. When a determined old mother, Orin (convincingly portrayed by 47-year-old actress Sumiko Sakamoto) demands to be taken to the mountains before she becomes infirm, her eldest son, Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata) is torn with grief. But Orin has put her house in order; the first part of the film, filled with the bawdy humor, abrupt violence and raw sex of village life, depicts a spring and summer of activity as she witnesses the exploits of her two younger sons and goes about finding a wife for the widowed Tatsuhei. Now, in late autumn, she demands to die. Mother and son climb the mountain in one of the most breathtakingly photographed and movingly depicted sequences in Japanese cinema; as Tatsuhei descends alone, the winter snows begin to fall.