Jitsuroku: Rengo Sekigun (United Red Army) at ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts

Wakamatsu's epic-scale docu-drama reconstructs the most troubling episode in the bloody history of Japanese student-radical extremism. The film opens with a short history of the radical movements of the 1960s (rooted in opposition to the renewal of the US-Japan Security Pact), which led to the founding of the United Red Army from two surviving splinter groups in the summer of 1971. Headed by Tsuneo Mori and Hiroko Nagata - political soulmates who eventually became lovers - the group retreated to a succession of 'training camps' in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture, sustained by pooled cash and armed with stolen weapons. There followed a terrifying quest for 'ideological purity' marked by the torture and murder of 'backsliders' and the hunting down and execution of attempted defectors. When Mori and Nagata were caught at a police roadblock, the group fragmented. Five members holed up in a ski lodge on Mount Asama, where they were massacred in a ten-day siege in February 1972. The film brings all of this to visceral life, passing no judgments but implicitly suggesting that this was the last generation in Japan who actually believed in something, and lived and died for their beliefs.