Woman in the Dunes

Woman in the Dunes is a 1964 Japanese film directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, adapted from Kobo Abe's novel of the same name, about an amateur entomologist who becomes trapped in a sand pit with a widow who lives there shoveling sand nightly to keep her house from being buried, and who must labor alongside her to survive. The film uses stark black and white cinematography and abstract, tactile close-ups of sand and skin to build a claustrophobic allegory of labor, isolation and eventual acceptance of one's circumstances. It won the Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival and is regarded as one of the major works of the Japanese New Wave.