Onoda - 10,000 Nights in the Jungle. 2021. France/Japan. Directed by Arthur Harari. In Japanese; English subtitles. 165 min.
In this absorbing epic, Arthur Harari immerses the viewer in the true story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer in the Imperial Army who was stationed on the Philippine island of Lubang during World War II, and, due to a combination of duty, nationalistic pride, and personal obstinacy, ended up marooned there for nearly 30 years, leading guerilla attacks and believing Japan was still at war. To tell this simultaneously absurd and poignant tale, Harari uses a classical narrative approach, punctuated by moments of meditative beauty, and anchored by the twin performances of Yûya Endô and Kanji Tsuda as Onoda. In dramatizing Onoda’s extraordinary, isolated years on Lubang, Harari questions whether war and patriotism are entirely psychological states of being.