Shohei Imamura's first color film, also known as Kuragejima: Tales From A Southern Island, offers a fresh look at the confrontation between the machine age and a waning primitive culture, stunningly photographed by Masao Tochizawa. “Filmed... entirely in the southern Ryukyu Islands, this... film has been called ‘an at times uneasy but always fascinating combination of documentary, epic, melodrama, and philosophical dissertation.' Playing once more with illusion and reality, Imamura goes back to the myths of the founding of human society in the Ryukyus - one of the likely sources of the Japanese people - and shows how the primitive beliefs survive, even beneath the veneer of modernization.” -Audie Bock, “Japanese Film Directors.”

The story is of a construction company engineer who arrives on a remote island to survey the possibilities for development. The villagers regard him, with all his modern gadgetry, as something of a god. The engineer is befuddled by the primitive conditions and strange ways he finds among the natives, who present him with a girl, Toriko, totally unencumbered by the complex rules of behavior of modern society.