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
-
Red Persimmons
Directed by Shinsuke Ogawa, Peng Xiaolian • Documentary • 2001 • 90 minutes
The ostensible subject of this remarkably beautiful film is the growing, drying, peeling and packaging of persimmons in the tiny Japanese village of Kaminoyama. The inhabitants explain that it is the perfect combination ...
-
Tatsumi
Directed by Eric Khoo • Animation • 2014 • 98 minutes
TATSUMI celebrates the life and work of Japanese comics artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi-a manga pioneer who elevated the genre to a new level of creative expression and adult realism. A comics-crazed teenager, Tatsumi began to get published and was ...
-
Tokyo Idols
Directed by Kyoko Miyake • Documentary • 2017 • 88 minutes
"IDOLS" has fast become a phenomenon in Japan as girl bands and pop music permeate Japanese life. TOKYO IDOLS—an eye-opening film gets at the heart of a cultural phenomenon driven by an obsession with young female sexuality and internet ...
