Ningen no joken III

“From a certain point, all my films deal with resistance to entrenched power. I think I’ve always questioned authority. That applied to my own life too, including my time in the military. After the war, a time finally came when we could address these issues directly,” commented Masaki Kobayashi, who began working on NINGEN NO JOKEN in the late 1950s, a nine-hour, unflinching indictment of the inhumane actions of the Japanese army in occupied Manchuria during the Second World War. Based on the mid-1950s autobiographical novel of the same name by Junpei Gomikawa and produced by the Ninjin Club, this sometimes graphically violent three-part epic depicts the journey of naïve idealist Kaji from being a conscientious objector and guard at a forced labor camp to eventually becoming a soldier and finally a Soviet prisoner of war.

NINGEN NO JOKEN III: 1945: Together with the few survivors of his unit, Kaji embarks on the arduous task of making his way home to his wife. After being turned away by a division on suspicion of being deserters and subsequently becoming embroiled in a skirmish with Chinese peasants, they find refuge in a settlement which is captured by Soviet troops shortly afterwards. Kaji becomes a prisoner of war and realizes that the inhumane conditions in the Red Army’s prison camp are in no way different from those in the camps under Japanese control. “Kobayashi radically questions the socialist utopia of a post-war Japan that could take its bearings from the USSR.” (Hans-Jürgen Wulff) (mg)