Ningen no Joken III

“At some point, all my films deal with resistance to entrenched power. I think I've always questioned authority. That was true for my own life too, including my time in the military. After the war, there was finally a time when we were able to address these issues directly,” says Masaki Kobabyashi and began working on NINGEN NO JOKEN at the end of the 1950s, a nine-hour relentless indictment of the inhumane actions of the Japanese army in occupied Manchuria during the Second World War. Based on the autobiographical novel of the same name by Junpei Gomikawa published in the mid-50s and produced by the Ninjin Club, the three-part epic depicts the path of naive-idealistic Kaji from a conscientious objector of a forced labour camp to a soldier and finally to a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp.

NINGEN NO JOKEN III: 1945: With the few survivors of his unit, Kaji starts an arduous attempt to make his way home or to his wife. After they are turned away by a division as supposed deserters and then get into a battle with Chinese farmers, they find shelter in a settlement, which, however, is captured by Soviet troops a short time later. Kaji is taken prisoner of war and realizes that the inhumane conditions in the Red Army prison camp are in no way different from those in the Japanese-led camps. “Kobayashi radically questions the socialist utopia of post-war Japan, which could be based on the USSR model.” (Hans-Jürgen Wulff) (mg)