Imamura’s Dr Akagi, adapted from the work of Ango Sakaguchi, takes a heady, jazz-inflected spin through wartime Japan, following its eponymous, zealous doctor on a mission to combat hepatitis as a deadly outbreak threatens to overwhelm his small seaside town in 1945. With the help of a morphine-addicted surgeon, a young sex worker turned medical assistant, and a lascivious monk, Dr Akagi is drawn into an increasingly labyrinthine journey through Imamura’s sweeping narrative quagmire, as the film stands as a paean to Imamura’s ever-expanding and characteristically complex cinematic vision.

Dr Akagi’s obsessive determination to cure the disease is bound up with his professed patriotism towards the Japanese Empire, even as it sinks further into decay. Imamura gradually forces his characters to confront the widening chasm between the individual and the nation, and between lived human experience and the ideological system that claims to contain it.