‘I considered starting over as a farmer’: Masao Adachi on political cinema, revolution and Japan today

2026-02-24 - 14:53

The director and ex-Japanese Red Army militant discusses his new film Escape, about the anarchist fugitive Satoshi Kirishima, the frustrations of radical film-making and progressive politics Last month, on the same day that Revolution+1 – a fictionalised account of the life of Tetsuya Yamagami, the man who assassinated the former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in July 2022 – screened at London’s ICA, during a season on the radical film-maker Masao Adachi, a court in Japan sentenced Yamagami to life imprisonment. Whether the programming was a result of foresight or sheer coincidence, the dismantling of boundaries that would otherwise keep movies hemmed inside a screen and removed from the world outside are characteristic of Adachi’s lifelong practice. Continue reading...