name a popular film set on a deserted island family feud

Set on a (fictional) subtropical island in the Okinawa archipelago, far south of Japan, it’s the culmination of Shohei Imamura’s 1960s explorations of people on the fringes of Japanese society, this time turning an ethnographic, almost entomological gaze upon the customs and community of this far-flung outpost. A cosmological spirituality creeps in, leading to a masterful, revelatory conclusion.ĭifficult to see in the west until it emerged on Blu-ray a few years ago, this mythic three-hour epic seems forged in piercing Pacific blue light. He brought his trademark neorealism to the depiction of life on the island, yet, as the film progresses, the volcano comes to symbolise a larger force. Rossellini saw Karin as the embodiment of the postwar ego, but, in depicting her unhappy marriage, he also explores wider questions of loneliness, femininity and emancipation. Karin immediately realises that she has swapped one prison for another. The village is sparsely populated, and the local priest tells them that people are desperate to leave – for life is hard there and, thanks to the volcanic rock, the earth is even harder. They travel to his home on Stromboli, a small volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

The melancholy tone established by the opening scenes renders The Edge of the World as a lament for the loss of the old world, and a recognition of the impossibility of sustaining it.įollowing on from his famed ‘war trilogy’, Stromboli continues Rossellini’s exploration of the aftershocks of the Second World War: in an internment camp for displaced people, Lithuanian refugee Karin (Ingrid Bergman) marries an Italian man she hardly knows in order to gain her freedom. The death in question is that of a way of life – specifically, the one lost with the evacuation of the Hebrides.

To leave, then, is equated with death, as the film’s symbolic, tragic ending makes clear. Nearby, a gravestone epitaph reads “gone over” – and, when the film then flashes back to tell the story of how Hirta came to be deserted, Andrew uses these very same words to describe his friend Robbie’s (Eric Berry) desire to leave (“you’ve gone over to the other side”). Once ashore, Andrew watches as ghostly images of the former residents walk past in double exposure, like the souls of the dead. The skipper, Andrew (Niall MacGinnis), tells the bourgeois yachtsman (Michael Powell) that the island’s name, Hirta, means death.

At the start of The Edge of the World, a sailboat circles an isolated, abandoned Scottish island.

Name a popular film set on a deserted island family feud