Joseph del Pesco is curator at Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco

Few artists have turned from creating revolutionary art into a commitment to true revolution like Masao Adachi, a collaborator with both the Japanese New Wave and the Japanese Red Army. A scriptwriter and colleague of Nagisa Oshima and Koji Wakamatsu, and a director of left-wing sex films, Adachi abandoned commercial filmmaking-and Japan-entirely in 1974 to join the extremist Japanese Red Army in exile in Beirut, where the group gained notoriety through deadly hijackings and bombings in support of a free Palestine and a worldwide communist revolution. Also in Beirut was the group's founder, Fusako Shigenobu, and her daughter, May, who lived incognito for years. A film on exile, revolution, landscapes, and memory, Anabasis brings forth the remarkable parallel stories of Adachi and May, one a filmmaker who gave up images, another a young woman whose undercover existence forbade keeping images of her own life. Baudelaire places Adachi and May's revelatory voice-over reminiscences over warm, fragile Super 8mm footage of Tokyo and Beirut, grounding their wide-ranging reflections in the solid reality of place. Anabasis provides a richly rewarding remembrance of a fascinating, now nearly forgotten era and reminds us of the power of cinema to both portray-and influence-its landscape.