WOMAN IN THE DUNES (35mm)

Original title: SUNA NO ONNA
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara
1964 | Japan | 147 minutes
Japanese with English subtitles

Thursday, May 21, 2026 | 7:30 p.m. | The Hollywood Theatre

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We are honored to present one of the great international art-house sensations of all time in 35mm.

Eiji Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle found in a vast desert. When he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night with a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) in her hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What follows is one of cinema’s most unnerving and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a depiction of everyday life as a Sisyphean struggle—an achievement that garnered director Hiroshi Teshigahara an Academy Award nomination for best director.

While often celebrated as a masterpiece of existential erotica, the film’s stirring ecological themes go beyond man versus nature into displacement, environmental labor, geology as sociology, and more.

Upon its release, WOMAN IN THE DUNES (SUNA NO ONNA) was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic world of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Kōbō Abe adapted his own novel for the screen, and it is often cited as a rare instance of the film being every bit as rich as the book.