(dir. Shôhei Imamura, 1967, Japan, 130 minutes)

Japanese New Wave director Shôhei Imamura, director of 1983’s The Ballad of Narayama and 1997’s The Eel (both winners of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival; Imamura is the only Japanese director to have ever won the prize twice), is presumably best known for his narrative films, but 1967’s A Man Vanishes, a documentary effort, is arguably his most influential. Focusing on the story of a missing person, the handsome businessman Tadashi, we spend a lot of time with his abandoned wife, Yoshie. Meanwhile, Imamura begins to seep into the story he’s trying to tell more than what anyone was expecting.

In Japanese with English subtitles.