Nobi (2015)

Nobi 2015 / 野火 2015 / Fires on the Plain

On an island in the Philippines, right before the end of World War II, Allied Forces and Resistance attacks have cut off the Japanese army’s food supply. Tamura is kicked out of his unit and the field hospital due to the tuberculosis he has. With nowhere to go, he roams through the jungle until he finds a Catholic church. He takes refuge but inadvertently kills a native girl and runs back into the jungle. He is able to join a group of Japanese stragglers, but the fear of death, hunger and guilt haunts him through hallucinations. And in the corpse-lined jungle, fellow soldiers and human lives do not matter, as they just seem like objects to satisfy one’s hunger. Here, Tamura finds himself existing on the edges of life and death. Tsukamoto Shinya’s Fires on the Plain explores the last moments of the Pacific War through a war straggler who is both victimizer and victim. And those moments are hell itself, created by those left behind and who have lost their dignity as human beings.