Following student unrest in late-1960s Japan, a small band of filmmakers retreated to the hinterland to create a new kind of cinema. At the center of both the filmmaking and the attendant community was its enigmatic leader, Ogawa Shinsuke. A man of great persuasive powers, Ogawa-san held his cadre together with words-often in the form of blistering critiques. As one participant remembered, "We were all a bit inclined to interrogate each other." Barbara Hammer gives reign to a panoply of characters in her reconstruction, at once attentive to details of material culture-raising a beautiful silkworm, or the life cycles of rice-and telling a chapter of social history that is both weighty and difficult, a chronicle of a communitarian vision gone awry.-Thor Anderson