Owl

is a 2003 Japanese black comedy film written and directed by Kaneto Shindō. It was entered into the 25th Moscow International Film Festival where Shinobu Otake won the award for Best Actress and Shindō was awarded a special prize for contribution to world cinema. Plot Around 1980, two women, a 37-year-old mother and her 17-year-old daughter, the last occupants of a farming village called "Kibogaoka" for Japanese returnees from Manchuria, are slowly starving to death. As the daughter contemplates eating a lizard, the mother suggests a better way to survive. They telephone a dam construction site and offer themselves as prostitutes. A worker comes to visit them and has sex with the mother. Afterwards, the women allegedly offer him Shōchū, but the liquid was actually made from a highly poisonous plant. This causes him to foam at the mouth, emit animal noises, and then die. They cart his body off and celebrate getting his money. With the money, the women are able to get food to eat, and have their electricity and water supplies switched back on. They seduce and kill both the electrician and the plumber in the same way, gaining more money, as well as another construction worker and the boss of the electrician. The local police inspector comes to investigate the disappearances of the men. As the women are about to seduce him, Mizuguchi, an employee of the repatriation department, whose father set up the unsuccessful village, arrives. The inspector quickly leaves, pretending he had been examining the house's stability. For the first time, the daughter, rather than the mother, sleeps with Mizuguchi. He gives them 500,000 yen and announces to commit suicide to atone for his father's mistake to have a village built on barren land. The mother decides not to kill him with the special drink. He asks 20,000 yen back for travelling to the site of his suicide and leaves.