The Escape

A legendary maverick of Japanese cinema examines the story of the country’s most wanted fugitive. Russian premiere as part of the Collective Cinema Festival.

Tôsô
2025, Masao Adachi

Japan
110 minutes, Japanese with Russian subtitles

Starring: Kanji Furutachi, Rairu Sugita, Soran Tamoto, Mutsuo Yoshioka

In the early 1970s, Satoshi Kirishima joined the radical East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front. Following a terrorist attack at the Economic Research Institute of Korea, the anarchist went into hiding and spent 50 years on the run, leading a quiet life under an assumed name. Eventually he became the country’s most wanted criminal and only revealed his true identity on his deathbed.

Still from The Escape, 2025

A remarkable late-career work that feels like both a culmination and a renewal of one of Japan’s most radical cinematic voices.

— John Lynn, International Cinephile Society

Masao Adachi, who shot The Escape a year after Kirishima’s death, knows as much about life on the run as his character. In the late 1960s, he joined the revolutionaries in Lebanon, spent nearly 30 years in hiding, was caught, spent several years in prison—and returned to filmmaking, continuing to direct well into his nineties. There is hardly another director in the world who has experienced first-hand the heavy burden borne by his criminal protagonist and the price of escape.