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The 72-year-old Wakamatsu Koji directed countless avant-garde porn quickies in the 1960s and 1970s, all of them centred on 'symbolic' male violence against women ('Violated Angels' was the only one released here), and screwed up several attempts to enter the mainstream Japanese industry in the 1980s and 1990s. He vindicates his entire career with 'United Red Army', a 190-minute docu-drama that traces the history of the terrorist left in Japan from its origins in 1960 (the violent protests against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Pact) to its end in 1972/3 with the police siege of the last hold-outs in a mountain lodge and the suicide in prison of the leader/ideologue Mori Tsuneo. Thanks to scarily convincing performances and a Peter Watkins-like objectivity in the telling, this gets as close as anyone will ever need to understanding how extremist groups function and why they end up imploding. Wakamatsu knew, liked and worked with some members of the group in the 1960s; he tells their story partly to write a history that's already almost forgotten but mainly to inform present-day drones that kids not so long ago lived and died for their beliefs.
'United Red Army' won't reach an arthouse near you anytime soon, and neither will 36-year-old Aditya Assarat's debut feature 'Wonderful Town' (Thailand), which won a Tiger Award in Rotterdam just before arriving in the Forum. A Bangkok architect arrives in the small southern coastal town of Takua Pa to supervise rebuilding after the 2004 tsunami. But there's next to nothing for him to do, and he drifts into a casual affair with the woman who runs the near-derelict inn where he lodges. Mindful of her local reputation, the woman takes it more seriously than he does, and he ends up paying the highest price for his lack of commitment. Aditya subtly infers that the man could be seen as the tsunami's final victim. In a film with minimal dialogue, the silences are charged with potent implications and sometimes startlingly intense emotions.
Equally sure to remain undistributed is the most interesting of the Forum's choices from China's indie sector. 'Sweet Food City' is a debut feature by 35-year-old Gao Wendong, the first indie film-maker to surface in the city of Dalian. This has a remarkable setting, the housing estate of the title (built in 1992 and already looking rather like Derek Jarman's set for Loudun at the end of 'The Devils') crowded with gangsters, looters, scavengers and streetwalkers. There are plenty of things wrong with this movie but it's nonetheless an exciting watch and a considerable achievement. Gao is one of those rare indie directors who thinks in 3D: almost every shot makes dynamic use of space and the consistently unexpected play between foreground, midground and background elements more than compensates for some dramatic shortcomings. Showing a chaste romance between a blowsy hooker and a jobless drifter, later complicated by the arrival of the man's destitute father, the film never quite finds the balance between social realism and expressionism it's looking for. But the sheer aesthetic brio of the staging and cutting justifies the integration of small homages to Bergman, Antonioni and Edward Yang.
One of the Forum's best Asian titles does have UK distribution, though Peccadillo Pictures says it will probably release it straight to DVD. 'Tirador' (literally 'slingshot' but also the Filipino slang name for a petty thief) by 47-year-old Brillante Mendoza is a group portrait of some inhabitants of a crumbling tenement in the Quiapo district of Manila, set in the month between Holy Week and an irredeemably corrupt local election. It's shot and acted with such spontaneity that most of it could pass for ciné-vérité documentary; it's structured in more or less discrete episodes but adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Mendoza (a former production designer who has made six features in three years, all of them ambitious) builds a humane but critical picture of lives with no improvement in sight. Given that he shot it on the lam in the real-life tenement, it's a heroic piece of work.