Saturday, May 20 at 9:00PM

     Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Saint Terrorism (Sei Terorizumu)

Directed by Masashi Yamamoto
Japan 1980, DCP, color, 127 min. Japanese with English subtitles

Saint Terrorism is an outsider fantasy, a vision of destructive life on the margins of early 1980s Japan. Yamamoto’s second jishu film shows the roots that blossomed into one of the great idiosyncratic talents of contemporary Japanese cinema, and one of the filmmakers who has stayed the most true to his jishu film origins. Here, he presents a collage of interwoven stories, lethally held together by a young woman who shoots people at random but later is convinced to switch to poison by a new compatriot. With a large and fearless cast, the film explores questions of sexuality and death in a contemporary Tokyo with dead bodies surreally hurtling from the sky just as the country itself is hurtling towards the hyper-affluent 1980s bubble era. Three years later, Yamamoto’s film Carnival in the Night created a sensation at the Berlin International Film Festival, making him a household name in Japan and on the international film festival circuit.

Film descriptions by Alexander Zahlten.