Cruel Story of Youth (Includes DVD)

Eureka Entertainment to release Japanese Director Nagisa Oshima’s landmark film CRUEL STORY OF YOUTH, a shocking tale of youthful delinquency in post-Hiroshima Japan, on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK in a Dual Format edition, available from 17 August 2015.

This second feature by the Japanese cinema-insurgent Nagisa Ôshima (In the Realm of the Senses, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence) galvanised its home-turf with its topsy-turvy directorial dexterity and stinging castigation of an indolent, self-indulgent youth culture reposing on the eve of the turbulent 1960s.

When high-schooler Makoto is saved from the advances of a lecherous middle-aged man by uni student Kiyoshi, the pair embark on a fits-and-starts affair that finally settles into a sexually extortionary, mutually exploitative dependency that promises to spell their relationship’s doom.

Ôshima’s breakthrough portrait of alienated youth comes courtesy of the 2014 Shochiku 4K scan that resurrected the film’s glorious colour palette, recently described by critic and programmer James Quandt as “running riot with retro: pulsing neon, turquoise telephones, hair teased into shellacked grandeur.” The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Cruel Story of Youth in a Dual Format edition, for the first time on Blu-ray in the UK.

Feature:

• Gorgeous 1080p presentation of the film on Blu-ray from the 2014 4K Shochiku restoration
• Optional English subtitles
• New video interview with film critic Tony Rayns
• Original theatrical trailer
• 36-page booklet containing an essay, interview material, and rare archival imagery