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Hiroshi Teshigahara (January 28, 1927 - April 14, 2001) was an
avant-garde Japanese film-maker. He was born in Tokyo, son to the famous
Sofu Teshigahara, founder and grand master of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana.
He graduated in 1950 from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and
Music and went on to direct his first film, The Pitfall, in collaboration
with author Kobo Abe in 1962. The film won the NHK New Director's award, and
throughout the 1960s, Teshigahara continued to collaborate on films with
Kobo Abe while simultaneously pursuing his interest in Ikebana and sculpture
on a professional level.
In 1964, the Teshigahara/Abe film The Woman in the Dunes was considered
for an Academy Award and ended up winning the Special Judge's Prize at the
Cannes Film Festival. In 1972 he worked with Japanese researcher and
translator John Nathan to make the movie Summer Soldiers, a film set during
the Vietnam War about American deserters living on the fringe of Japanese
society.
From the mid-1970s on, Teshigahara's directing output on feature films
decreased as he concentrated more on documentaries, exhibitions and the
Sogetsu School, eventually becoming the grand master of the school in 1980.
On the first anniversary of his death, in April, 2002, a DVD box set of
his most famous works was released in Japan to commemorate his work.
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