David Desser, Professor of Cinema Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures, will provide introductory comments for each screening. All films are in Japanese with English subtitles and will be shown in the Krannert Art Museum auditorium .
Admission is free.
Highly stylized sets and brilliant black and white cinematography cohere to create a dynamic confrontation between film and theater, between filmmaker and audience. Nagisa Oshima is the best-known of Japan's postwar filmmakers, a major figure in the Japanese New Wave and a major figure in the international cinema, as well. This film is among his most politically engaged and cinematically challenging. If comparisons to Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard are apt, nevertheless Oshima details very specifically Japanese issues in a very particular Japanese manner. The film is all at once an examination of discrimination against Koreans in Japan, a condemnation of the death penalty, and a darkly comic expose of institutional hypocrisy.