Bay Area Premiere!

Introduced by Patrick Macias

"Battle Royale demonstrates that it's still possible to be transgressive."-Sight & Sound

Legendary director Kinji Fukasaku returns to his infamous ultraviolent, antiauthoritarian aesthetic with this reality–television parody involving cute schoolchildren stabbing, shooting, and strangling one another for TV prizes, which predictably shocked politicians-and delighted audiences. By a government edict reacting to rising unemployment and juvenile delinquency, cheerfully clueless school kids are forced onto a new TV program: dumped on a deserted island, they're given weapons and told to kill one another until only one remains. Like the cast of Beverly Hills 90210 suddenly caught in a Sam Peckinpah film, these teen idols might still gossip about shared crushes, but only after first decapitating the class president. As their tracksuited gym teacher, "Beat" Takeshi Kitano stone–faces through the film as if teen vs. teen throat–slashing was as ordinary as home economics and driver's ed. Dragging society's anything–to–win fixation towards its literal, blood–soaked nadir, Battle Royale messily, gleefully sullies every cultural hypocrisy in sight.