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The Human Condition Part 1: No Greater Love
Now in beautiful new 35mm CinemaScope prints, Masaki Kobayashi’s epic masterwork will be shown in its entirety with the director’s vision intact. The Human Condition is a brilliant, clear-eyed view of humanity in all its terrible beauty. Kobayashi illuminates the generality of his title by focusing on the specific: the soldier Kaji (the charismatic Tatsuya Nakadai, a Japanese James Dean) whose socialist ideals ill-equip him to fight for his country in World War II, finding his patriotism and abhorrence of injustice subjected to the worst the world can offer.
In Part One, Kaji is a supervisor in a forced labor camp in southern Manchuria. He and his wife (the luminous Michiyo Aratama) struggle to improve the conditions in the camp for the enslaved Chinese, but his efforts alarm the Japanese supervisors. He is labeled a dissenter and is tortured. Forcefully inducted into the Japanese army, he must defend a country he increasingly finds indefensible.
Cast & Crew
Director: Masaki Kobayashi
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