This year's Tokyo International Film Festival was a bit different for me. For the first time since 2003 I was not on the jury for Japanese Eyes, a section spotlighting Japanese movies that might otherwise get lost in the glare of big commercial releases. This gave me more leeway to pick and choose what I wanted to see. In any case, I managed to take in 11 local films not only in the Japanese Eyes but the Competition and Special Screenings sections as well.
The best of these by far was "United Red Army (Jitsuroku Rengo Sekigun — Asama Sanso e no Dotei)," Koji Wakamatsu's 3-hour epic about the bloody and brutal events that, in February 1972, led up to five student radicals barricading themselves inside the Asano mountain lodge in Nagano Prefecture. The incident ended up as a one-sided gun battle with police.
The battle, reported round-the-clock by the Japanese media, riveted the entire country and became emblematic of the descent of idealistic student activism (fueled by oppostion to the Vietnam War) in the early 1970s.