United Red Army

At the end of the sixties the Japanese student movement splinters and hardens. Two of the most radical groups merge into the United Red Army and withdraw into the mountains to run a training camp. There, revolutionary training turns into an internal tribunal: under the name of self-criticism the leaders force members to account for themselves, and the punishment starts with beatings and ends in death. The group kills twelve of its own. Those who are left then hold out for days in a mountain lodge with a hostage. Kōji Wakamatsu came out of the protest cinema of the sixties himself, and here he is filming the collapse of his own generation. He paid for most of it himself and did not cut the running time below three hours. The telling neither prosecutes nor absolves; it looks at how ideology managed to make people this merciless towards the person standing next to them. The siege at the lodge was broadcast live in Japan and drew record audiences.