L'anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, et 27 années sans images
Eric Baudelaire
France | 2011 | 66 min
Languages : English, Japanese, French
Subtitle : French
As the screenwriter for directors such as Nagisa Oshima and Kōji Wakamatsu, Masao Adachi was deeply involved with the left-wing radical politics of his time. After a trip to Lebanon to meet the notorious Japanese United Red Army, he decided to join them. Masao Adachi was arrested in 2001 and forced to return to Japan. Director Eric Baudelaire uncovers one of the best-kept secrets of Japanese cinema and society.
Masao Adachi, born on 13 May 1939 in the Fukuoka Prefecture, was one of the men at the vanguard of the new wave of Japanese cinema of the 1960s. As the screenwriter for directors such as Nagisa Oshima and Kōji Wakamatsu, he was deeply involved with the left-wing radical politics of his time. After a trip to Lebanon with Oshima and Wakamatsu to meet the militants of the notorious Japanese United Red Army, he decided to join the terrorist group. Living in Lebanon for almost 28 years, he was arrested on charges of passport violations in September 2001. French filmmaker Eric Baudelaire tries to uncover what happened in the life of a director who for 27 years lived without images. Armed with an 8mm camera, Baudelaire returns to Lebanon shooting the places where Masao Adachi lived with the members of the United Red Army. Thus the story of May, daughter of Fusako Shigenobu, leader of the URA, and Masao Adachi is brought back to life through Baudelaire’s grainy pictures and returned to the chronicles of the political upheavals of the 20th century after almost thirty years of oblivion.
GIONA A. NAZZARO