A great shocker in 1976, Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses is by now considered the first completely successful attempt to make a serious film about sex and sexual passion. It is based on a true 1936 story which concerned a woman found wandering the streets after having apparently killed and mutilated her lover with his consent. Writing in Newsweek Charles Michener noted: “Working in the tradition of the Marquis de Sade, the French philosopher Georges Bataille and the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, Oshima has dramatised an orgiastic, obsessive affair with the gravity and visual elegance of a Japanese woodprint and has obtained from his leading actors, Eiko Matsuda and Tatsuya Fuji, performances of intense naturalness.”

Additional screening at 9:00 p.m.