The Sun’s Burial

NEW 35mm PRINT!  │  One of three highly charged features Oshima directed in 1960 (Cruel Story of Youth and Night and Fog in Japan were the others), The Sun’s Burial can be likened to Buñuel’s Los Olvidados — or Pasolini’s Accattone — set in the Osaka slums. The film’s heroine is Hanako, who survives by selling her blood during the day and her body during the night. She’s the link between two criminal gangs locked in violent Darwinian struggle, one a band of young pimps and petty thieves, the other a group of older mobsters and militarists, including Hanako’s father, who plan on profiteering from an impending WWIII between Japan and the Soviets. “The story unfolds like a scroll painting of hell, with the director saying: Rip away the façade of peaceful, modern Japan and you will find a dog-eat-dog philosophy” (Tadao Sato). “Oshima repeatedly ends scenes with cityscapes of the sun setting over the decrepit slum. The Sun’s Burial, with its corrupt, conniving characters, its squalor and cruelty, is the director’s disgusted mockery of the nation’s self-image as ‘the land of the rising sun’” (Nelson Kim, Senses of Cinema). Colour, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 87 mins.