September 22-30 | 2009 | Metropolis Empire Sofil

United Red Army

Director: Koji Wakamatsu

190 min | Japan

   United Red Army is a brilliant reconstruction of the most troubling episode in the bloody history of Japanese student-radical extremism. In 1972, 14 members of the United Red Army faction lynched each other during group “self-criticism” sessions while training in the mountains and the survivors holed up at the Asama Sanso Mountain Lodge, which quickly degenerated into a ten-day stand-off with the police that is one of the pivotal moments in Japanese history, as famous in Japan as Martin Luther King’s assassination is in America.

   Wakamatsu’s film is an earnest attempt to process the shock that the Japanese left was experiencing at the time and to grasp the motivation of the militant students.

   A gut-wrenching docudrama underlaid with electrifying psychedelic rock music by Sonic Youth founder member Jim O’Rourke.

1. •Metropolis Empire Sofil theatre September 30th | 8:00 pm