Farewell to the Ark

A remote, closed village. Its people are leaving for the city one by one, and leaving their traditions and superstitions behind them. In the village are two cousins who love each other; the relationship draws the anger of the others and a quarrel breaks out. Time does not run properly in this place; remembering and forgetting get mixed together. This is Shuji Terayama's last film; the director died in 1983 at forty-seven and it was released only after his death. He wrote it with Rio Kishida. The film draws loosely on Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. It screened at Cannes. The images are staged like theatre, and the line between the real and the fabulous is deliberately rubbed out.