A vacationing entomologist suffers extreme physical and psychological trauma after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village and made to live with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them.
Yikes, but for a film almost entirely set outdoors its remarkably claustrophobic! Its about the exploring bug hunter Jumpei (Eiji Okada) who finds himself a bit lost out in the sand dunes after he misses the last bus of the day. A friendly villager offers him some shelter for the night, buy boy is he ill-prepared for quite what that man, and his entire village, has in store. He is placed with a widow, but when he wakes in the morning discovers that her home is deep within a sand well and the only way out is the ladder he climbed down to enter - and thats gone! Its a precarious existence for this women (Kyôko Kishida) for if she doesnt keep the sand levels down, they will swamp her home and swallow her up. The villagers assist in so far as t...
