“The most fantastic scenario in the history of cinema – a masterpiece” (Luc Moullet). For many critics the high point of Oshima’s cinema in the Sixties – countless essays have been written about it, by everyone from Keiko McDonald to Tadao Sato – Death by Hanging challenges its audience to a test at the outset. “Are you for or against the abolition of the death penalty?” it demands before going on a funny, shocking Brechtian bender as it tells the true story of R., a Korean student who is hanged for the rape and murder of two women, but whose body will not cooperate with the state: it simply refuses to expire. From this grimly ironic situation Oshima makes stinging black comedy. Resuscitated, R. is found to be amnesic, and after consulting the guide-book about this unimaginable situation, panicked prison officials are forced to  “reconstruct” his identity and re-establish his guilt so they can hang him all over again. Exquisitely designed and shot, its story derived from the writings of the actual R. and divided into seven chapters, Death by Hanging “for three quarters of its length can be read as a brilliantly, insolently witty Brechtian parable” (Tom Milne, Monthly Film Bulletin) but gradually darkens to become “probably the most powerful film against capital punishment ever made” (Pacific Film Archive). “Oshima’s angriest and most moving film” (Tony Rayns).