Shunya Ito

Director and screenwriter, Shunya Itō is a Japanese film director known for starting the Sasori Female Prisoner Scorpion series of 1970s exploitation films starring Meiko Kaji.

He won Picture of the Year at the Japanese Academy Awards in 1985 with his film Gray Sunset,[2] a story of a man suffering from Alzheimer's disease. This thus became Japan's entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film instead of Akira Kurosawa's Ran, which caused a slight uproar in Western media as many critics thought Ran had a real chance of winning whereas Gray Sunset was not even shortlisted. (Galbraith)

The above information is sourced from the Shunya Itō Wikipedia page.