Boy

NEW 35mm PRINT!  │  Japanese cinema authority Donald Ritchie has pronounced this 1969 feature “Oshima’s finest film.” Inspired by a notorious news story from 1966, Boy tells the story of an itinerant Japanese couple who train their 10-year-old son to jump in front of moving cars and fake injury, in order to extort money from the alarmed drivers. The boy’s sci-fi fantasies provide his only respite from a dreadful existence. This wrenchingly realistic drama, beautifully shot in Cinemascope, is one of the versatile Oshima’s most straightforward films, but also one of his most affecting, offering a powerful portrait of an exploited child and of rot and repression at the core of Japanese family values. “Stunning . . . Fiendishly difficult to obtain in any format, and far less known than Cruel Story of Youth and In the Realm of the Senses, Boy, like much of Oshima’s work, trawls through the margins of modern Japanese desperation” (Megan Ratner, Film Comment). “Extraordinary . . . As well as having great narrative interest, [it] is a portrait of the moral confrontations forced upon the new Japan” (David Thomson). “Masterly . . . told with remarkable social and psychological insight” (Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide). Colour, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 105 mins.