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Comparing his heroine, Tome Matsuki (played by Sachiko Hidari, who won the 'Best Actress' award at the 1964 Berlin Film Festival for the role) to the restlessness and survival instincts of worker insects, The Insect Woman is an unsparing study of working-class female life. Beginning with Tome’s birth in 1918, it follows her through five decades of social change, several improvised careers, and male-inflicted cruelty.

Elliptically plotted, brimming over with black humour and taboo material, and immaculately staged in crystalline NikkatsuScope, The Insect Woman is arguably Imamura's most radical and emphatic testament to female resilience.

'My heroines are true to life – just look around you at Japanese women. They are strong, and they outlive men', director Shohei Imamura once observed. And so his audacious, anthropological approach to filmmaking came into full maturity with this vast 1963 chronicle of pre- and post-war Japan.