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"Exposed in utero to Hiroshima’s radioactive fallout, the late and uncompromising Kazuhiko Hasegawa (1946-2026) was led to believe early in life that he would not live long as a tainai hibakusha (unborn atomic bomb victim). These uncertain beginnings would instill in Hasegawa an acrimonious distrust of authority, itself ingrained within the very fiber of his every contribution to film, a sum of only two directed works: The Youth Killer and The Man Who Stole the Sun—both monumental and radical in their own right. Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies in Japanese cinema remains that the towering “Goji”—a nickname from Hasegawa’s college football days—would never make another film. His long gestating dream of a followup, the unrealized epic United Red Army, was rumored for decades with involvements from Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Oshima scenarist Tsutomu Tamura; Hasegawa himself would proclaim, “I can’t die until I’ve made one more,” but it would never come to fruition.
But Hasegawa’s seventies twofer holds the rarified status of establishing the filmmaker’s legend for their existence alone. His 1976 directorial debut The Youth Killer—a veritable shock to the system in its nihilistic depiction of a parricide—was then followed by the singular The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979), a watershed of Japanese cinema history, broaching his own personal history with the irradiating atom bomb as an apathetic, gum-chewing science teacher threatens to detonate a homemade nuclear weapon, taking the country hostage for somewhat innocuous demands. Having entered the industry under the tutelage of Shohei Imamura and then served an assistant director and scriptwriter during Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno era before his two films, Hasegawa’s post-directorial career phase was to build a new future for young filmmakers, leading the independent production outfit The Directors Company (Direkan), named after the Hollywood New Wave venture founded by Coppola, Friedkin and Bogdanovich. It would be at the short-lived Direkan that Hasegawa’s vision of a “director-first” mode of production would flourish, even for a short while. A young wave of filmmakers—including former The Man Who Stole the Sun AD Shinji Somai and production manager Kiyoshi Kurosawa—ushered in a new era with defining new works of the 1980s."—Japan Society