Tsukamoto's Fires on the Plain screens at Venice Fest

Stranded by war, soldiers turn to cannibalism

(ANSA) - Venice, September 2 - Award-winning Japanese actor and director Shinya Tsukamoto revisits World War II and a platoon stranded on a Filipino island with no supplies whose members resort to cannibalism in his film Fires on the Plain, which screened Tuesday in competition at the 71st Venice Film Festival.

The movie is based on Ooka Shohei's 1951 novel by the same title, which explores the degradation and isolation of one man, Private Tamura, as he loses first his hope and then his sanity as he slowly starves in the jungle. "I can sense the seventy-year-old horror and screams of those who decayed in the jungle. I pick it up on a radar that's directly connected to my spine, and I injected those sensations into every frame," Tsukamoto, who has been dubbed Japan's David Lynch, said in his director's statement.