Outlaw-Matsu Comes Home
Japan • 49m
Directed by Shohei Imamura • Documentary • 2012 • 48 minutes
Shohei Imamura rejoins Fujita, one of the subjects of IN SEARCH OF THE UNRETURNED SOLDIERS IN THAILAND, for the former soldier's first trip home to Japan following his post-war exile.
Fujita's reunion with Japan is not a happy one. He learns that his parents were killed in Nagasaki, his sister and his children have fallen into poverty, and his successful brother resents him for his disappearance.
Fujita's angry reckoning with the gulf between pre- and post-war Japan makes for one of Imamura's most direct critiques of the abandonment he believed characterized the newly prosperous country.
"Imamura makes sure there are no clear lessons to be drawn, only brilliantly assembled portrayals of the mixture of atrocity and tenderness that constitutes humanity."—David Auerbach, Waggish
Up Next in Japan
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The Unreturned Soldiers In Malaysia
Directed by Shohei Imamura • Documentary • 1971 • 45 minutes
In Malaysia, Imamura follows one false lead after another as he tries to locate unreturned Japanese who had given up the culture of their birth to integrate with Malaysian society. These wrong turns take the filmmaker on a tour through...
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The Unreturned Soldiers In Thailand
Directed by Shohei Imamura • Documentary • 1971 • 50 minutes
Imamura has better luck in Thailand, where he brings together three unreturned soldiers to discuss their experiences during the war and after.
The three men—a farmer named Fujita and two doctors: Toshida and Nakayama—have responded ve...
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Vampire Clay
Directed by Soichi Umezawa • Drama • With Ena Fujita, Yuyu Makihara, Momoka Sugimoto • 2017 • 81 minutes
From Japanese special effects master Soichi Umezawa comes a singular horror experience in a wildly hilarious marriage of The Blob and The Evil Dead. After studying in Tokyo, Kaori returns to ...
