Northwest Film Forum

"Perhaps the most brilliant and feeling of Imamura's fine documentaries"(Joan Mellen), THE MAKING OF A PROSTITUTE explores a little-known aspect of 20th-century Japanese history: the thousands of Japanese women who were sold into prostitution and sent abroad to service Japanese soldiers during the country's military expansion into Southeast Asia. Badly treated and abused, many of these women were not welcomed back by their families, and remained unrepatriated after the war. The film focuses on one particular Karayuki-san, a forgotten 73-year-old living in poverty in Malaysia. She takes Imamura on a tour of the prostitute quarter where she had arrived as a slave 54 years earlier, and reflects on the sad, often unspeakable events of her life.

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"Perhaps the most brilliant and feeling of Imamura's fine documentaries."-Joan Mellen, THE WAVES AT GENJI'S DOOR