Dirty Hearts

When Japan surrendered in 1945, most of the Japanese immigrants in Brazil did not believe it; they took the defeat for American propaganda and waited for news of victory. Those who accepted the truth were declared traitors, threatened, and some of them killed by their own countrymen. The film tells this through the eyes of the wife of one of the men spreading the belief in victory; she watches her husband, a hard-working immigrant, turn step by step into a killer, and the bond between them come apart. Vicente Amorim’s ninety minute Brazilian film was adapted from Fernando Morais’s book and rests on the real actions of the organisation called Shindo Renmei. Tsuyoshi Ihara and Takako Tokiwa appear; it was completed in 2012.