to other filmmakers. Hani's 1961 feature debut, Bad Boys was based upon the actual experiences of the disaffected youth seen in a reformatory; Hani felt that casting the same youth as actors would lend his film authenticity, blurring the lines between fiction and documentary in the process. Hani would go on to complete several other features through the 1960s – among them the Antonioni-like She and He (1963), Song of Bwana Toshi (1965), which dramatizes a spiritually and psychologically-themed journey to East Africa undertaken by a Japanese engineer facing family difficulties, and Nanami, The Inferno of First Love (1968). Hani, who was one of few true independents within the movement (and was – for this reason – one of its real cornerstones) would later retreat from feature filmmaking, primarily out of disillusionment: I do not admire people, though I admire many persons. But I don't like what society does to persons. It perverts them. Yet, I don't want to attack society. I am not that kind of person. What I would like to do is ignore it. Or better, show something else. This is what I have done in my pictures, including the animal ones Many of Hani's subsequent nature films were shot in Africa, an area he first explored in the Song of Bwana Toshi. Though fiction, the feature film presaged Hani's later professional moves, and – in its theme of a man's attempt to "find himself", it stands as one of the more personally revelatory examples of Japanese New Wave filmmaking, revealing the direct human ambitions situated underneath the styles closer to the movement's surface. Shōhei Imamura Alongside Nagisa Oshima, Shōhei Imamura became one of the more famous of the Japanese New Wave filmmakers. Imamura's work was less overtly political than Oshima or several filmmakers who emerged later in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Imamura in many ways became a standard-bearer for the Japanese New Wave: through his last feature (Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, 2001), Imamura never lost interest in his trademark characters and settings. Imamura had once been an assistant of Yasujirō Ozu, and had – in his youth – developed an antipathy towards Ozu's (and Kenji Mizoguchi's) finely crafted aestheticism, finding it to be a bit too tailored to approved senses of "Japanese" film. Imamura's preference was for people whose lives were messier and for settings less lovely: amateur pornographers, barmaids, an elderly one-time prostitute, murderers,