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
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