Onoda - 10 000 Nights in the Jungle
Intimate, but also epic drama about a Japanese officer who spent almost thirty years in the Philippine jungle, unaware of the end of the Second World War.
Japan, 1944. Hiroo Onoda, 22 years old, is sent to Lubang, a small island in the Philippines where the Americans are about to land. His role will be to wage a guerrilla war together with an ever-dwindling group of soldiers under his command.
In the old-school style of filmmakers like John Ford and Samuel Fuller, ONODA tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, who missed the news about the surrender of imperial Japan in 1945 and dutifully continued to hide on a Philippine island. It was not until 1974 – ten thousand nights after the end of the Second World War – that he stopped fighting.
French director Arthur Harari takes almost three hours to tell the story of Onoda. The film opens as an old-fashioned war film but evolves towards a mysterious and serene survival story. ONODA opened the Un Certain Regard section of the Festival de Cannes earlier this year to critical acclaim.