SING A SONG OF SEX

In Nagisa Oshima’s molten artifact of late-’60s revolt, four sexually hungry high school students from a provincial city accompany their teacher to Tokyo to take university entrance exams. The teacher dies and one of the boys may be the culprit.

Oshima, "the Godard of Japan," delivers a radical narrative collage that digs deep into the root of a world of power imbalances: between city and country, young and old, rich and poor, men and women, Japan and Korea. Equal parts campus satire, political fever dream, and psychic autopsy of youth in freefall, SING A SONG OF SEX finds music as the central site to explore a society tearing itself apart.

“A messy film which could be said to contain Oshima’s grand theory of sex, violence, and politics. Fantasies of sexual violence become a stand-in for the violence of war as a whole, the rage of men without direction, and the ultimate silencing act against women and colonized people who would remind Japanese men of the imperial crimes on which the modern nation of Japan is founded. SING A SONG OF SEX is a revelation of the underlying contradiction between the controlled political subject and the violent fantasies within — the possibility that we are engaged with revolutionary politics because, underneath, we desire destruction, both of others and ourselves.” - Caitlin Casiello