Imamura's first color masterpiece offers a fresh look at the confrontation between the machine age and a waning primitive culture. The film was photographed entirely in the southern Ryukyu Islands. Imamura once again plays with illusion and reality in combining extravagant epic, documentary, and philosophical dissertation. A construction company engineer arrives on a remote island to survey the possibilities for development. With all his modern gadgetry, the villagers regard him as something of a god. For his part, he is befuddled by the primitive conditions and strange ways he finds among the natives, and all the more so when they present him with a girl, Toriko, who is totally unencumbered by modern society's complex rules of behavior. Setting his film at the likely geographical source of the Japanese people and, according to myth, of human society, Imamura studies not the primitives, but the survival of primitive beliefs in civilized Japan.