The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images
Director Eric Baudelaire
Countries France
Duration 66 min
Synopsis
Who are May and Fusako Shigenobu? Fusako —leader of a small extreme left-wing group, the Japanese Red Army, involved in a number of terrorist operations— has been in hiding in Beirut for almost 30 years. May, her Lebanon-born daughter, only discovered Japan at the age of 27 after her mother was arrested, in 2000. And Masao Adachi? A screenwriter and radical activist filmmaker, committed to armed struggle and the Palestinian cause, was also underground in Lebanon for several decades before being sent back to his country. In his years as a film director, he had been one of the instigators of a ‘theory of landscape’: through filming landscapes, Adachi sought to reveal the structures of State oppression that explain social alienation. Anabasis? The name given, since Xenophon, to wandering, circuitous homeward journeys.
Who are May and Fusako Shigenobu? Fusako —leader of a small extreme left-wing group, the Japanese Red Army, involved in a number of terrorist operations— has been in hiding in Beirut for almost 30 years. May, her Lebanon-born daughter, only discovered Japan at the age of 27 after her mother was arrested, in 2000. And Masao Adachi? A screenwriter and radical activist filmmaker, committed to armed struggle and the Palestinian cause, was also underground in Lebanon for several decades before being sent back to his country. In his years as a film director, he had been one of the instigators of a ‘theory of landscape’: through filming landscapes, Adachi sought to reveal the structures of State oppression that explain social alienation. Anabasis? The name given, since Xenophon, to wandering, circuitous homeward journeys.