Internationally acclaimed for their formal style and power, Nagisa Oshima's films have always dealt with controversial issues which Japan's Establishment would rather see swept under the carpet. Based upon a famous Laurens van der Post novel (The Seed and the Sower), Oshima's "Senjo no Meri Kurisumasu (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence)" once more breaks taboos and takes skeletons out of the closet, airing a subject that not even a fairly long history of Japanese anti-war films has dared to touch upon: the treatment of the inmates of wartime prison-camps by their Japanese captors.