A landmark of the Japanese New Wave and one of the defining works of two-time Palme d'Or winning director Shōhei Imamura, The Insect Woman is a sweeping, unsparing portrait of a woman's life across four turbulent decades of Japanese history.
Born in poverty in rural Japan in 1918, Tomé spends her life trying to escape the constraints of class, circumstance, and the men who exploit her, moving through factory work, domestic servitude, and eventually the sex trade.
Sachiko Hidari (A Fugitive from the Past, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters) gives a career-defining, heroic performance filled with extraordinary physicality, in a towering, devastating work of humanist cinema that is perfectly befitting of Shōhei Imamura’s key philosophy - to make “messy, really human, unsettling films."