In Osaka’s slum, youth without futures engage in pilfering, assault and robbery, prostitution, and the buying and selling of identity cards and of blood. Alliances constantly shift. Tatsu and Takeshi, friends since boyhood, reluctantly join Shin’s.

Assigned to make a topical youth film, Oshima produced an intense, theatrically inflected study of Osaka criminal gangs that, like the films of Pasolini, finds both dignity and cruelty in the violent world of the criminal proletariat. Oshima uses a fragmentary narrative structure to interweave multiple stories of petty criminality and prostitution into a brutal typology of the underworld emerging in Japan’s war-scarred slums. The Sun’s Burial is tempered by the unusual beauty of its mise-en-scène and the choreographed long takes that follow the rhythmic rise and fall of a symbolically overripe sun which casts an unnatural glow over the film.