Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War

A low-budget declaration of world war, this grainy, handheld propaganda film from Japanese filmmakers Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao follows Japan’s Red Army faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Lebanon as they prepare for revolution. An exemplar of Japanese fukeiron, the theory of invoking landscapes as a means to explain a place’s social and political reality, the filmmakers locate power through shaky, lo-fi footage of bleak desert terrain, tracking the seemingly banal day-to-day lives of disparate militias training for impending battle.