Hokage

At first glance, the latest film by the cult director Tsukamoto Shinya will draw comparisons to nightmarish anti-war classics like Elem Klimov’s IDI I SMOTRI, which follows a child protagonist plunged into a world of violence and brutality. In HOKAGE, the third instalment in the director’s trilogy (NOBI, 2014; ZAN, 2018) about the human consequences of war, Tsukamoto explores the ruins of post-World War II Japan through the eyes of a nameless orphan (Oga Tsukao). As the boy struggles to obtain basic needs like food and shelter, he encounters a sickly sex worker living in an abandoned ramen shop; later, he is recruited for a shady job by an ex-soldier suffering from extreme PTSD. Best known for his grisly cyberpunk tragedy TETSUO, Tsukamoto takes an unconventionally minimalistic approach here to the depiction of wartime devastation, presenting the boy’s fablelike journey as a sparse near-chamber piece set in cramped dwellings and depopulated dirt roads. For Tsukamoto, there is nothing awe-inspiring or epic about systematic bloodshed; HOKAGE, instead, shows us defamiliarised spaces and people warped by trauma as the context for a child’s moral awakening as well as his coming-of-age. (Beatrice Loayza)

Tsukamoto Shinya: TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (1989), HIRUKO THE GOBLIN (1991), TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER (1992), TOKYO FIST (1995), BULLET BALLET (1998), GEMINI (1999), A SNAKE OF JUNE (2002), VITAL (2004), NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE (2006), NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE 2 (2008), TETSUO: THE BULLET MAN (2010), KOTOKO (2011), FIRES ON THE PLAIN (2014), KILLING (2018)