Who are May and Fusako Shigenobu? Fusako?the leader of an extremist left-wing faction of the Japanese Red Army involved in a number of terrorist operations?has been in hiding in Beirut for almost thirty years. May, her daughter, was born in Lebanon and only discovered Japan at the age of twenty-seven after her mother’s arrest in 2000. And Masao Adachi? A screenwriter and radical activist filmmaker committed to armed struggle and the Palestinian cause, he was also underground in Lebanon for several decades before being sent back to his native country. In his years as a film director, he was an instigator of a “theory of landscape,” fukeiron. Through filming landscapes, Adachi sought to reveal the structures of oppression that underpin and perpetuate the political system. Anabasis? It is the name given, since Xenophon, to wandering, circuitous homeward journeys.
 
It is this complicated, dark and always suspenseful story that Eric Baudelaire?an artist renowned for using photography as a means of questioning the staging of reality?chose to bring forth using documentary format. Filmed on Super 8mm, and in the manner of fukeiron, contemporary panoramas of Tokyo and Beirut blend with archival footage, TV clips and film excerpts as a backdrop for May and Adachi’s voices and memories. The characters speak of everyday life, of being a little girl in hiding, of exile, politics and cinema, and their fascinating overlap. All of this adds up not so much to an enquiry as a fragmented anamnesis. [Jean-Pierre Rehm, the FID Marseille catalog]