Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, The Ballad of Narayama is a visceral portrait of a nineteenth-century rural Japanese village governed by distinctive rituals that garter daily life. Imamura takes the legend of Narayama as a way to explore, almost in anthropological detail, primordial values – shaped both by brutal primal instincts and profoundly human-made hierarchies – to make us question the bounds against which societies are defined.