Year: 1990
Duration: 115'


Miho and Toshio have been married for ten years. They have two children. Toshio teaches part-time at a high school at night while he struggles to write a novel. A crisis strikes the family when Toshio’s affair with another woman comes to light. For Miho, who grew up on a remote island in the south, and for Toshio, who imagines himself as a modern writer, this leads to a descent into a psychological abyss. Faced with her husband’s betrayal, Miho experiences a spiritual breakdown that will slwowly drive her crazy.


The Sting of Death is the story of a wife’s judgement of her husband. The husband’s ego is judged in a drama that tests man’s ability to recover from the abyss and start anew. This film uses the medium of the relationship of a husband and wife in order to graphically depict the character of the Japanese people in the post-war era.”

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, sceneggiatura/director, screenplay Kohei Oguri
soggetto/story dal romanzo omonimo di/from the novel of the same title by Toshio Shimao
fotografia/cinematography Shoei Ando
montaggio/film editing Nobuo Ogawa
scenografia/production design Yoshinaga Yokoo
musica/music Toshio Hososkawa
suono/sound Hideo Nishizaki
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Keiko Matsuzaka (Miho), Ittoku Kishibe (Toshio), Midori Ciuchi (Kuniko), Takenori Matsumura (Shinichi), Yuri Chikamori (Maya), Akira Yamanouchi (Masagaro), Miyoko Nakamura (Riki)
produttore/producer Seiya Araki
produzione/production Shochiku, Schochiku Daiichi Kogyo
vendita all’estero/world sales Shochiku
Menu