Atsushi Yamatoya


Atsushi Yamatoya was a Japanese film director, screenwriter and actor. His son is a screenwriter and race horse owner Akatsuki Yamatoya.

Life and career

Atsushi Yamatoya was best known as the screenwriter for Seijun Suzuki's 1967 film Branded to Kill, which is "a stark, spastically existential—and, most affronting of all, defiantly unmarketable—crime-flick abstraction that unfolds like the director's cracked self-portrait."
Jasper Sharp, author of Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, said, "Yamatoya is definitely very interesting." According to Roland Domenig, Yamatoya used his pink films for "formal experiments," while other directors such as Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi used their pink films as "political propaganda."
Yamatoya died of esophageal cancer on 16 January 1993. In that same year, he was posthumously awarded on the 2nd Japan Film Professional Awards.

Filmography

As director