The Man Who Left His Will on Film

A student filmmaker intent on committing suicide captures his final days on film, but after the young man’s death the footage is seized by the police. As his classmates discuss ways to get hold of the film and camera, the most radical among them decides to take matters into his own hands. Obsessed with his quest, he starts a relationship with the deceased’s girlfriend. When they finally get hold of the footage, the line between past and present begins to blur as the young man increasingly identifies with his dead friend. Incorporating figures from Japan’s burgeoning amateur filmmaking scene, this was Oshima’s final statement on the student protest movement he had lambasted in 1960’s Night and Fog in Japan.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

• New 4K restoration from the original negative
• Uncompressed mono PCM audio
• New interview with actor Kazuo Goto (2025, 20 mins)
• After the Tokyo War - a visual essay by Julian Ross that unpacks the complex network of influences on the film (2025, 17 mins)
• New interview with critic and author Junichi Konuma on composer Toru Takemitsu (2025, 22 mins)
• Newly improved English subtitle translation 
• Sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by Filippo Di Battista

Year: 1970
Country: Japan
Cert: 18
Format: Blu-ray
Region: ABC
RAD148BD
EAN: 5060974682942
Release date: 17/08/26

Festivals and Awards:

Official Selection Director's Fortnight Cannes Film Festival 1971

Official Selection Venice Film Festival 2024

"One of the most urgent, anxious cinematic interventions into the post-1968 defeat of the radical youth movement" - Harvard Film Archive

"Evoking the ingeniously constructed logic puzzle and oblate reality of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and Chris Marker’s La Jetée, along with the densely structured parallelism and tongue-in-cheek cerebrality of Raoul Ruiz (most notably, Three Lives and Only One Death), The Man Who Left His Will on Film is an elegantly wry, engagingly challenging, and provocative exposition on identity, fantasy, and memory." - Acquarello, Strictly Film School

"Nagisa Oshima's metaphysical study of those around it, both an elegy for the student movement and a renewed call to arms." - Fernando F. Croce - Cinepassion