One of the great masters of postwar Japanese cinema, rebellious filmmaker Nagasi Oshima was also one of his generation’s most politically engaged artists. For instance, he makes a remarkable elegy to the failed student protests in his controversial feature Night and Fog in Japan (1960), which the studio almost immediately withdrew from theaters.

Diary of Yunbogi is an ethereal montage of still images with dark, somber undertones based on photographs Oshima took during a study trip to South Korea in 1965. In Seoul, he was haunted by street children. The voiceover consists of diary entries by a ten-year-old Korean boy and Oshima’s reflections on Japanese-Korean relations. He revisited this controversial subject in his later films, Sing a Song of Sex and Death by Hanging.