is a 2007 film written, directed and produced by

Kōji Wakamatsu was a Japanese film director who directed such ''pinku eiga'' films as and . He also produced Nagisa Ōshima's controversial film ''In the Realm of the Senses'' (1976). He has been called "the most important director to emerge in the pink film ...

. It stars Akie Namiki as Hiroko Nagata and

Go Jibiki is a Japanese actor. He was born on May 7, 1976, in Tokyo, Japan. Because of his father's business, he spent his early life in Singapore (1983–86) and New York (1986–89), and thus learned to speak English fluently. After returning to Japan, ...

Tsuneo Mori was a Japanese radical leftist and terrorist. He was born in Osaka and entered the Osaka City University. After some members of the Red Army were arrested by the Japanese police while he escaped from them, several members of the group went to Nort ...

, the leaders of Japan's leftist paramilitary group, the

United Red Army The was a militant organization, that operated in Japan between July 1971 and March 1972. The URA was formed as the result of a merger that began on 13 July 1971 between two extremist groups, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist , led in 1971 by Tsuneo ...

. Akie Namiki was nominated for Best Performance by an Actress at the 2008

Asia Pacific Screen Awards The Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA) is an international cultural initiative overseen by the Asia Pacific Screen Academy and headquartered in Australia. In order to realise UNESCO's goals of promoting and preserving the different cultures th ...

Story

The film is told in three acts, beginning with a historical background of Japan's

student movement Student activism or campus activism is work by students to cause political, environmental, economic, or social change. Although often focused on schools, curriculum, and educational funding, student groups have influenced greater political e ...

of the 1960s and early 1970s, mostly using archive footage and a narrator. The second act follows the formation of the group to their mountain training camps in the southern

Japanese Alps The is a series of mountain ranges in Japan which bisect the main island of Honshu. The peaks that tower over central Honshu have long been the object of veneration and pilgrimage. These mountains had long been exploited by local people for raw m ...

. It emphasizes the dogmatic (and eventually hypocritical) bullying of the group by Mori and Nagata, with 12 members being killed. The third act shows the splitting up of the group after two members run off. It follows one group of five members to

Karuizawa is a resort town located in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. , the town had an estimated population of 20,323 in 9897 households, and a population density of 130 persons per km². The total area of the town is . Karuizawa is one of the oldest and most ...

and a hostage-taking and police standoff known as the

Asama-Sansō incident The was a hostage crisis and police siege at a mountain lodge near Karuizawa in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, which lasted from February 19 to February 28, 1972. The police rescue operation on the final day of the standoff was the first marathon ...

Production

In order to make the film Wakamatsu mortgaged his home (which he destroyed in the movie) and distributed it himself. The actors were not allowed to wear make-up, had to arrive on set already in costume, and had their agents and managers banned during filming. The musical score is by the American composer and musician Jim O'Rourke.

Reception

''United Red Army'' has a 93% approval rating on

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

, based on 14 critics. The film holds a 67/100

average In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, ...

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

. It was Jordan Hoffman's choice in

IndieWire IndieWire (sometimes stylized as indieWIRE or Indiewire) is a film industry and review website that was established in 1996. The site's focus was predominantly independent film, although its coverage has grown to "to include all aspects of Hollyw ...

's 2018 list of the best Japanese films of the 21st century.

References

External links

* * *
United Red Army Official Movie Site
2007 films 2007 drama films Films directed by Kōji Wakamatsu Communism in fiction 2000s Japanese films {{2000s-Japan-film-stub