Year: 1981
Duration: 105'


Osake, 1956. Shimpei and his second wife run a restaurant on the banks of the river Aji. Their nine-year-old son, Nobuo, makes friends with a boy his age, Kiichi, who lives with his mother and sister on a boat that is moored close by. Nobuo’s parents don’t prohibit the new friendship between the two children but they do forbid their son from visiting the Kiichi’s house. But Nobuo decides to disobey the order and one evening he discovers that Kiichi’s mother is a prostitute who receives her clients on the boat. Kiichi’s mother realizes that Nobuo has seen her and decides to weigh anchor and go further down the river.


“The reason why the film is entitled Muddy River is that water is limpid at its source, but as it travels toward the sea it is transformed into a stream and then into a river, becoming increasingly muddy and mud is the essence of a river. In the same way, a child can be as pure as water at its source and then experience, life, the knowledge of happiness and pain are his nourishment. The ‘mud of humanity’ is what I wanted to celebrate in this film.”

Biography

film director

Kohei Oguri

Kohei Oguri (Maebashi, Japan, 1945), after graduating in drama from the University of Waseda, worked as assistant director for Masahiro Shinoda and Kiriro Urayama. In 1981 he directed his first film, Muddy River (the screen adaptation of a novel by Teru Miyamoto), which tells of the difficulties of a group of young people in Osaka during the 1950s and which represented a return to the genre of shomingeki, neo-realistic tragicomedy in black and white. The film received an Oscar nomination for best foreign film and second prize at the Festival of Moscow. In 1984, his second film, For Kayako, based on a novel by Hwe-Song Lee about discrimination against Koreans in Japan, won the George Sadoul prize. In 1990 his film The Sting of Death was  awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the Festival of Cannes and the FIPRESCI prize. In 1996 he directed the film Sleeping Man, Grand Jury Prize at the Festival of Montreal. In 2005, after almost a decade’s absence, he shot The Buried Forest, a metaphysical fable that shows daily life in a small mountain village. The film was presented in the section Quinzaine des Réalizateurs at the Festival of Cannes.

FILMOGRAFIA

Doro no Kawa (Muddy River, 1981), Kayako no Tameni (1984), Shi no Toge (The Sting of Death, 1990), Nemuru Otoko (Sleeping Man, 1996), Umoregi (The Buried Forest, 2005).

Cast

& Credits

regia/director Kohei Oguri
soggetto/story dall’omonimo romanzo di/from the novel of the same title by Teru Miyamoto
sceneggiatura/screenplay Takako Shigemori
fotografia/cinematography Shoei Ando
montaggio/film editing Nobuo Ogawa
scenografia/production design Akira Naito
musica/music Kuroudo Mori
suono/sound Hiroyuki Hirai, Hideo Nishizaki
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Nobutaka Asahara (Nobuo), Takahiro Tamura (il padre di Nobuo/Nobuo’s Father), Yumiko Fujita (la madre di Nobuo/Nobuo’s Mother), Minoru Sakurai (Kiichi), Makiko Shibata (Ginko), Mariko Kaga (la madre di Kiichi e Ginko/Kiichi’s and Ginko’s Mother),
Gannosuke Ashiya (il cocchiere/Horse-cart Man), Reiko Hatsune (la tabaccaia/Tobacco Shop Woman), Keizo Kanie (il poliziotto/Policeman), Yoshitaka Nishiyama (la guardia/
Warehouse Guard)
produttore/producer Motoyasu Kimura
produzione/production Rimura Productions
vendita all’estero/world sales Gold View
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