The Lower Depths: Imamura's documentaries on outsiders.

This is a programme of three mid-length television documentaries by the Japanese director Shohei Imamura, screening together at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The films turn toward the rural, the regional and the stateless: one visits the hometown of Imamura's mentor Yuzo Kawashima in the Shimokita Peninsula and its rituals of mourning, one explores the Sulu Archipelago in the Philippines and tensions between Muslim Tausug and indigenous Badjao communities, and one follows a former soldier whose return to postwar Japan exposes how the nation abandoned those who served it. Across all three, Imamura's frank on-camera interviewing style undercuts the idea of national unity and meets people left outside the modernising state. The programme has a total runtime of 124 minutes.