Nagisa Oshima

Nagisa Oshima (大島渚, born March 31, 1932 in Kyoto, Japan) is a famous Japanese Director. After graduating from Kyoto University he was hired by Shochiku Ltd. and quickly progressed to directing his own movies.

Oshima is most famed for his provocative 1976 film Ai no corrida (Realm of the Senses), a film based on a true story of fatal sexual obsession in 1930s Japan. Oshima, a prolific critic of censorship and his contemporary Akira Kurosawa's humanism, was determined that the film should feature hardcore pornography and thus the film's undeveloped film cans had to be transported to France to be developed and an uncensored version of the movie is still unavailable in Japan.

In his 1978 companion film to Ai no corrida, Ai no borei (Empire of Passion), Oshima took a more restrained approach to depicting the sexual passions of the two lovers driven to murder, and the film won the 1978 Cannes Film Festival award for best director.

In 1996 Oshima suffered a stroke, but he returned to directing in [1999] with the period piece Gohatto.