Film Festival spotlight

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“Dr. Akagi” is a 1998 film based during WW II about a doctor (Akira
Emoto)who starts a one-man battle against hepatitis, earning him a reputation
as “Dr. Liver.”

But his efforts start to make the Japanese army wary of the doctor’s intentions,
and as the war negatively progresses for the Japanese, Dr. Akagi finds himself
increasingly a scapegoat.

Akagi is aided by a colorful group of misfits including a drug-addicted surgeon
(Masanori Sera), a former prostitute (Kumiko Aso) and an escaped Dutch POW
(Jacques Ganblin) in his quest to rid Japan of the hepatitis virus.

Tickets for the festival are $2 per film and will be honored on a first come,
first serve basis. Tickets are available at the Student Publications Office,
Anspach Hall Room 8.

Here’s what some critic’s wrote about Dr. Akagi”:

“Imamura’s straightforward directorial style effectively tells the doctor’s
story and the consequences when his unusual quest turns into an obsession.”

— Ed Scheid, Box Office Magazine

“Shohei Imamura continues deepening his vision, invoking feelings of
love and destiny as his film builds to a final image at once as ominous, ironic
and darkly amusing as a scene out of ‘Dr. Strangelove.’”

— Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times

“‘Doctor Akagi’ is a nice, sweetly nostalgic portrait of a
brief and strange moment in history, one squeezed between the surrender of
Germany and the dropping of the atomic bomb.”

— Joshua Klein, The Onion A.V. Club

“Imamura has a wonderful habit of throwing surprises into scenes, sometimes
to jolt us to attention and sometimes merely because that’s the way life is.
They can be as simple as someone suddenly opening a screen, but he saves the
most amazing one for the last sequence, 10 minutes of thrilling filmmaking.”

— Bob Graham, The San Francisco Chronicle.