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. The film was photographed entirely in the southern Ryukyu Islands by Masao Tochizawa. Imamura once again plays with illusion and reality in creating what has been described as "an at times uneasy but always fascinating combination of documentary, epic, melodrama and philosophical dissertation." The story is of a construction company engineer who 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. Audie Bock writes, "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."