The Cinefamily (Venue Partner)
611 N Fairfax Avenue
323.655.2510
This event has passed.
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United Red Army
- When
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Wednesday Nov 4, 2009 (8–11pm)
- Where
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- Price
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$12
- Links
VIEW TRAILER
"Consensus is boring." -- Koji Wakamatsu
For 35 years, director Koji Wakamatsu has been mulling over what happened to the idealism and moral imperative of the far left Japanese student movement that left a rash of dead bodies and unanswered questions, and his latest film is as close to his heart as Schindler's List was for Spielberg. In the unflinchingly violent United Red Army, Wakamatsu dramatizes the self-immolation of the fiercest of Japan's underground paramilitary groups, who, in the early '70s, after internal strife led to the murders of fourteen of its own twenty-nine members, fled to a remote mountain location and instigated a police standoff which lives in infamy to this day. No stranger to radical politics, Wakamatsu not only drew from interviews with surviving URA members, but also from his own street-level experiences with the URA and other subversive organizations at the time -- affiliations which landed him on the U.S. State Department's no-visa blacklist, where he remains to this day. Backed by a searing psych rock score by former Sonic Youth member Jim O'Rourke, United Red Army is a film that doesn’t pretend to have the answers, but is instead an epic dissection of ideology can trump reason.
Dir. Koji Wakamatsu, 2008, 35mm, 190 min.
