REVOLUTION +1

Veteran Japanese filmmaker Adachi Masao (b.1939) has remained an unrelenting firebrand and true radical throughout his long career. His newest work, REVOLUTION +1, extends the mode of politically outspoken activist cinema refined in the films he has made since returning to Japan after spending almost thirty years in Lebanon as part of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Deliberately more accessible than earlier avant-garde landmarks such as AKA SERIAL KILLER (1969), REVOLUTION +1 is nevertheless equally courageous and controversial in its direct address to an incendiary, even taboo, topic, here the motivations guiding the assassin of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Responding immediately to the shocking July 8, 2022 murder of the right-wing nationalist, known both for his aggressive economic policies and stubborn denial of Japanese war crimes, Adachi set out to make a film that could tell the untold story of the young assassin—named Kawakami Tatsuya in the film—who had been pushed into a life of extreme deprivation after his mother was pulled into an extreme and predatory religious cult, the notorious Unification Church, which was once a staunch Abe supporter. Making even harder-hitting his intervention against the non-critical assessment of Abe’s legacy by the political establishment, Adachi set out to direct his film in record time so it could, in fact, be released on the same date as Abe’s state funeral that September. Written in three days, shot in just over a week, REVOLUTION +1 is impressive for its crisp, sympathetic and nuanced account of Kawakami’s life and fatal act. The film proved as controversial and well received as designed: attracting both record audiences and massive protests, while sparking a national reckoning.