Student Guerilla

Five high-school students decide to embark on a guerrilla-style revolution in the mountains for their fight against their school's graduation ceremony. Shot in CinemaScope in the midst of the student protests of late 1960s Japan, Adachi Masao's fifth 'pink film' with Wakamatsu Productions is a comedic oddity and a candid portrait of collective struggle. It shows how the joint pursuit of what you believe in brings pleasure, but also critiques the inner group frictions (uchi-geba) that occurred in many revolutionary factions during the nationwide protests. The film foreshadows the Asama Sanso Incident of 1972 where such conflicts culminated in a shoot-out between police and student activists in the mountains that is widely considered to have marked the failure of their revolution. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)