LOADING
Directed by Masao Adachi | 120 minutes | 15+ | Australian Premiere |
4:00pm Sunday, 17 May | Balam Balam Place - Cinema 4 | Buy Tickets | Buy Passes
Legendary filmmaker/leftist terrorist Masao Adachi's latest manifesto contemplates what it takes to fix the world via contemplation, explosion, revolution!
Filmmaker and activist Masao Adachi is considered one of the most radical voices in 20th and 21st century cinema due to his heavy involvement with the Japanese Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Adachi’s been making politically provocative movies since the 60s, and he’s still thinking about the will for and consequences of political violence in the current moment. For Adachi, cinema is a battlefront, and he’s fighting.
Following his 2022 docudrama on the Shinzo Abe assassination in Revolution+1, Adachi turns to another true story of political terrorism: Satoshia Kirishima, a former anti-imperialist anarchist bomber who lived as a fugitive from 1975 to shortly before his death in 2024, all those years passing police stations plastered with his youthful mugshot on his way to work. Escape ruminates on the dual struggles of resistance and survival through the memories and daily living of someone who tried and failed to jumpstart a revolution. This may be a movie by an old man about an old man, but there’s a burning contemporary rage beneath all the mourning for what could have been. What can be done now to save the world from annihilation by empire?
SIMILAR: Born in Flames, In The Realm of the Senses, late-period Clint Eastwood, Empty Metal
“Escape is neither a simple valorization of Kirishima’s legacy nor a boring lecture about the deleterious effects of a life dedicated to radical politics. Adachi … is focused on history — his own, Kirishima’s own — as near-spectral events that continue to haunt in low-lumen light, even in a lonely apartment.” - Zach Lewis, In Review Online
“i was surprised by how much i was tearing up throughout: the tenderly melancholic meeting of younger and older selves, and especially the scene where an older satoshi shares a drink with his unaged “senior,” emphasising all those years, and everything else, lost.” - lauren *:･ﾟ✧, Letterboxd
Country: Japan
Year: 2025
Language: Japanese