Two life stories intersect when the legendary underground film director Masao Adachi join the Japanese Red Army (JRA) in Libanon in the early 1970s and becomes a father figure of May Shigenobu – daughter of the JRA founder and leader Fusako Shigenobu. Eric Baudelaire weaves together the stories of Shigenobu and Adachi with contemporary landscape imagery from Tokyo and Beirut – a method called Fukeiron (a theory of landscape), used and developed by Adachi, where the camera is turned towards everyday sceneries rather than people as a way of capturing the ubiquity of state power.
The Anabasis… is a film about political engagement and filmmaking, about exile and what it is like to grow up with ever changing identities and about memories and what the effect the lack of images can have in people’s lives.
