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『夏の妹』

In-Person Screening

Saturday, May 14 at 7 pm

Released the year of the reversion, Oshima’s final ATG production presents an uncharacteristically cheerful exterior with its faraway passages to tropical vistas and cinema-verité naturalism. Teenage Sunaoko receives a letter from her stepbrother, inviting her to visit him on Okinawa, and together with her guardian Momoko, she travels to the prefecture under the guise of a tourist. Their guide, a beer-guzzling ex-soldier, takes them to the locale’s tourist attractions, quickly delving into the underlying scars of the island’s wartime history. With its contradictory, light-hearted tone, Oshima’s disruptive politics reveal entanglements of identity, generational disputes on Okinawa’s future, and the complicated nature of the islands’ history with Japan, all accompanied by the breezy, sundrenched bliss of Toru Takemitsu’s breezy score.

Dir. Nagisa Oshima, 1972, 97 min., 35mm, color, in Japanese with English subtitles. With Hiromi Kurita, Lily, Shoji Ishibashi.