Masao Adachi

A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but somehow survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next.

A film on exile, revolution, landscapes and memory, Anabasis brings forth the remarkable parallel stories of Adachi and May, one a filmmaker who gave up images, the other a young woman whose identity-less existence forbade keeping images of her own life. Fittingly returning the image to their lives, director Eric Baudelaire places Adachi and May’s revelatory voiceover reminiscences against warm, fragile Super-8mm footage of their split milieus, Tokyo and Beirut. Grounding their wide-ranging reflections in a solid yet complex reality, Anabasis provides a richly rewarding look at a fascinating, now nearly forgotten era (in politics and cinema), reminding us of film’s own ability to portray—and influence—its landscape.

A detective investigating a serial rapist discovers that he and the perpetrator come from the same lineage of depraved individuals, a genealogy of violent and sexually perverse deviants that stretches through the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras and can even be traced back to the Edo era.

Shoji runs a store in a desolate town in northern Japan. After the death of his wife, he longs to end his life so that his daughter will receive his life insurance money. But suicide is not covered by his contract, so he seeks help and meets Saki, who is also suicidal. Yoshitaka Kamada raises profound questions about life, death, and the importance of humanity.

Yasuo (Hiroshi Abe) grew up as an orphan. He married a woman he loved and they had a son Akira (later played by Takumi Kitamura). Yasuo's life seemed great at the time, but his life totally changed after his wife died in accident. Since that time, Yasuo, who never experienced parents' love himself, has to raise his son Akira alone.

Questioning the meaning of people's lives, the multiple stories include the work of a manga artist, old men get involved in a fight and a murder, a bus incident which affects those who survive it, fishing, cherry-blossom viewing and more

The first in a planned series of films about radical filmmakers by film critic Nicole Brenez and filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux, It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve is a portrait of Masao Adachi, who emerged during the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s as a screenwriter for Nagisa Oshima and Koji Wakamatsu, and directed a series of avant-garde films that grafted radical politics to the sexploitation genre. A 1971 visit to a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) training camp while on the way back from Cannes resulted in Adachi's most infamous film, the agit-prop documentary Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, which he co-directed with Wakamatsu. Soon after, Adachi joined a splinter cell of the Japanese Red Army in Lebanon, where he stayed from 1974 until he was deported to Japan in 1997 to serve time for passport violations.

A deeply personal portrait of one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in Japanese cinema: filmmaker, writer, and revolutionary Masao Adachi.

Three students spend their holidays at the seaside where they are mistaken for Koreans, a minority which is looked down on in Japan. The action develops into a crime story.

Yuji and Yuriko's peaceful life shatters when an old diary belonging to Yuji's great-uncle Sadaichi, who died in the war, is discovered. The pages are full of an obsession with life... and one strange phrase: "I want to devour the bird—Hikuidori." From that day on, eerie phenomena start to haunt those connected to the diary. As the nightmare deepens, a strong will to live—once buried with Sadaichi—begins to twist the past and bleed into reality.

A press photographer returns to Japan from the war in Vietnam after losing his friend and fellow photographer on the battlefield.

A militant revolutionary group is torn apart by betrayal as its members descend into paranoia and sexual decadence.

On their way back from the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, filmmakers Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao visited Lebanon to meet Japan's Red Army faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to shoot a newsreel film promoting the Palestinian resistance. Conceived as a ‘declaration of world war’ that implicates us all, the directors capture the everyday banality of military training and preparation exercises for imminent battle.

Making-of documentary for Masao Adachi's "Prisoner/Terrorist"

A man keeps his girlfriend tied up in his small apartment and tortures her. She is undressed, subjected to various types of bondage, whipped, and tortured with a razor blade.

Documentary filmmaker Kenjiro Fujii takes a look at the history of a distinctly Japanese brand of softcore pornography in this extensive examination of the "pinku eiga" genre (ピンク映画 Pinku eiga or Pinkeiga). For more than 40 years, so-called "pink" films have served as both a key source of revenue for the Japanese film industry as well as a launching pad for the careers of such mainstream filmmakers as Kiyoshi Kurosawa. After providing a detailed history of the still-profitable and popular genre through interviews with a variety of behind-the-scenes players and clips from such classic pink films as Fish Bait Boobies, director Fujii shifts his focus to the production of an upcoming pink film to offer a glimpse into the creative and stylistic evolution of the genre.

Shirō raids the office of the organization that attacked his lover, wreaking havoc and escaping with a stolen handgun. In retaliation, the organization hires two killers to get rid of Shirō. The duo begin to develop a strange kinship with their target...

This is a documentary produced for Al Jazeera Documentary by May Shigenobu. May revisits the Japanese leftist activism in the 60s and the 70s, to understand why some Japanese students decided to dedicate their lives to the Palestinian cause by talking to the then leaders and visiting iconic locations of the time. It includes exclusive interviews with some leaders in the students' movements in Japan, Adachi Masao, as well as PFLP leaders such as Layla Khaled and Abu Ahmed Fouad. The documentary also talks about the Japanese Red Army members and their families living underground.

AKA Serial Killer documents the social upheaval and political oppression that roiled Japan in the 1960s, profiling a nineteen-year-old serial killer Norio Nagayama. An indictment of media sensationalism, the film humanizes the young man by situating his crimes in the larger context of his environment.

A documentary on sixties counterculture in Japan featuring Donald Richie, Tadanori Yokoo, Masao Adachi, Koji Wakamatsu, Toshio Matsumoto and Akaji Maro among others.

Pinku from 1967.

The late Fujio Akatsuka is revered by many Japanese artists and scholars for his developments to early comedy manga, but his contributions aren't just limited to the world of print media. Featuring commentary from family, friends, colleagues, and celebrity fans, Fujio Akatsuka's story is told with archival footage and animation, showcasing the life of the man who went beyond manga.

No synopsis available yet.

Masao Adachi, the author and director of experimental works and pinku-eiga in the 1960s, was a member of the Japanese New Left that shifted from being a filmmaker to a guerrilla fighter. In 1974, he joined the Japanese Red Army in Lebanon, which worked closely with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck met Adachi in Tokyo in 2018 and talked with him about a wide range of topics, including art, revolution, the influence of western avant-garde art and American underground; the Japanese Red Army; collaboration with secret services; the role of the Left after 1968; and the reasons for failures of leftist ideas and strategies.

In the Edo era, two man arrive in a village and engage in criminal activity. While one of them becomes successful and rich, the other gets betrayed and ends up in prison, burning for revenge. The truth changes with the viewpoint in this Wakamatsu film, which has inspired comparisons to Rashomon.

In Tokyo's Shinjuku district, the lives of a young man prone to theft, a young woman he meets at a bookstore, and a kabuki actor intersect.

Go, Go, Second Time Virgin is the story of two damned and abused teenagers who meet and fall in mutant love on a Tokyo rooftop. Their only hope is to cement their love with an escape into oblivion.

A brother and sister live as outcasts from their hamlet due to a belief that mental illness runs in their family. A group of villagers plot to steal their property by beating and hanging the brother and gang-raping the sister. Believing the brother to be dead, scheming to kill the sister, and making both deaths look like accidents... unbeknownst to them, the brother survives and proceeds on a mission to slaughter those responsible in the hamlet.

A critique of the Japanese family, seen here as militaristic, absurdly incestuous and patriarchal with the father dominating his family sexually and violently. Nihilistic destruction by the young ones seems to be the only way out.

Fumiya owes 5 million yen to a female load shark for a gambling debt, while having affair an with Mrs. Hosoi who offers him 5 million to murder her husband. Fumiya has no choice but to kill Mr. Hosoi. Unfortunately he's see by a neighbor. In the escape, he meets a girl named Akiko. He hides in her house. Later on, Fumiya and Akiko fall in love and have sex. After that, he finds that the house owner Shin kidnapped Akiko whem she was a little girl and has kept her in the house for over a decade. Fumiya is determined to take her away from Shin's brutal confinement. A battle of wills between jailer, prisoner and accidental savior begins….

Biopic about jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe and his wife, noted writer Izumi Suzuki.

A bunch of young hipsters kidnaps a loving couple and keeps them trapped in a barren landscape. To the sounds of free jazz they are performing various experiments with the couple. In the distance is a yakuza gang keeping track of the youths. Who are really experimenting with whom?

The insane gynecologist, Dr. Marukido Sadao (Marquis de Sade), theorizes that a woman is unable to become pregnant if she is writhing in intense pain during intercourse. He sets about testing this new method of birth control by torturing women during sex.

The insane gynecologist, Dr. Marukido Sadao (Marquis de Sade), theorizes that a woman is unable to become pregnant if she is writhing in intense pain during intercourse. He sets about testing this new method of birth control by torturing women during sex.

Overripe with psychosexual poetry and stark, oneiric rituals, Adachi's filmmaking debut, made while he was still an undergraduate, counts among the more resonant accomplishments of the now famous Nihon University Film Club. Adachi's obvious fascination with the wide-eyed watchfulness of childhood and the uncanny is an expression of the important surrealist strand running throughout the post-WWII Japanese avant-garde. - Harvard Film Archive

A detective investigating a serial rapist discovers that he and the perpetrator come from the same lineage of depraved individuals, a genealogy of violent and sexually perverse deviants that stretches through the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras and can even be traced back to the Edo era.

Pinku from 1966

Pinku from 1972.

After 15-year-old Yasuko has her first orgasm with a teacher, she and her disillusioned group of friends decide to turn to prostitution to gain a better understanding of what emotions truly are.

After 15-year-old Yasuko has her first orgasm with a teacher, she and her disillusioned group of friends decide to turn to prostitution to gain a better understanding of what emotions truly are.

Based on the factual case of a young man who broke into a nurses' home in Chicago, mutilating and killing several of the inmates, Wakamatsu's film is a precise, sad delineation of a particular aspect of masculine sexual consciousness.

A Japanese teenager bicycles aimlessly through the countryside after killing his mother.

A small gang of revolutionary students is hidden away by a small-time thief. While they are in hiding, everyone except the thief takes turns engaging in sexual activities with a girl who appears unhappy and perhaps unwilling, having had the misfortune of getting involved with them.

Tatsuya Kawakami's mother becomes a member of a religious group after her husband commits suicide, and makes a large donation to the organization. Her three children are forced to live in poverty, and her eldest son, who is blind in one eye due to illness, takes his own life. Kawakami comes to believe that the religious group has ruined his life, so he creates a homemade gun and carries out an assassination plot against former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who has close ties to the religious group, which has been accused of siphoning off money from its members.

Tatsuya Kawakami's mother becomes a member of a religious group after her husband commits suicide, and makes a large donation to the organization. Her three children are forced to live in poverty, and her eldest son, who is blind in one eye due to illness, takes his own life. Kawakami comes to believe that the religious group has ruined his life, so he creates a homemade gun and carries out an assassination plot against former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who has close ties to the religious group, which has been accused of siphoning off money from its members.

In this bizarre world of distorted human pleasures, we have come to accept the most heinous crimes against mankind as just another example of the degeneration of our species. Even the most jaded individual could not forgive the creators of the Love Robots. Love Robots are beautiful young girls, abducted right off the street who, through a procedure that rivals anything the Marquis de Sade might have dreamt of, are turned into monsters, capable of killing a man or loving him on command.

Three students spend their holidays at the seaside where they are mistaken for Koreans, a minority which is looked down on in Japan. The action develops into a crime story.

A militant revolutionary group is torn apart by betrayal as its members descend into paranoia and sexual decadence.