NEMURU OTOKO

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).