Shinya Tsukamoto, the iconoclastic Japanese filmmaker best known for the body-horror landmark Tetsuo: The Iron Man, has set a Japan release for his latest feature, Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, an English-language drama based on the true story of an African American Vietnam War veteran who became a peace activist with deep ties to Japan. The film is scheduled to open in Japanese theaters in September, setting up a potential Venice Film Festival launch.
The project marks a significant departure for Tsukamoto, who wrote, directed, shot and edited the film — his first primarily English-language feature — across locations in the United States, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan. Broadway veteran Rodney Hicks, an original and closing cast member of Rent, takes his first major screen lead as Allen Nelson, while Oscar-, Emmy- and Tony-winner Geoffrey Rush plays Dr. Daniels, a Veterans Affairs physician who intervenes in Nelson’s downward spiral. Tatyana Ali (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) plays Nelson’s wife Linda, and newcomer Mark Merphy appears in flashbacks as the young Nelson.
The film is rooted in the nonfiction account of Nelson, who grew up in New York and enlisted in the Marine Corps at 18, seeking an escape from poverty and discrimination. After training at Camp Hansen in Okinawa, he was deployed to Vietnam in 1966, where he participated in village raids that targeted men, women and children as suspected Viet Cong. He returned home severely traumatized, and spent years homeless before finding treatment through the VA. Nelson went on to devote his life to anti-war advocacy, returning to Okinawa in 1996 and ultimately delivering more than 1,200 lectures at schools and community halls across Japan. He died in 2009 and is buried in the country.
Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? completes what Tsukamoto has described as an informal trilogy of 20th-century war films. Fires on the Plain (2014), his adaptation of Shohei Ooka’s classic novel about a Japanese soldier’s harrowing experience in the Philippines, competed in the main competition at the Venice Film Festival. Shadow of Fire (2023), set in Japan’s devastated black markets in the immediate aftermath of World War II, premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti section, where it won the NETPAC Award. Where those films examined the Japanese experience of wartime atrocity and its aftermath, Mr. Nelson shifts the lens to the American side — and specifically to what the filmmaker calls “the wounds of those who perpetrated war.”
Tsukamoto says the project gestated for seven years, tracing its roots to his research for Fires on the Plain.
“The most terrifying work of nonfiction I encountered was Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?” he says. “This book, in which he poured out his crimes and the life that followed without holding anything back, has stayed with me ever since and is deeply etched in my heart.”
He adds that Nelson’s story — “having spent his entire life sharing his wartime experiences” — is more essential now than ever, “in today’s world, where conflicts are raging in various places.”
The film is produced and distributed in Japan by Kinoshita Group and its distribution arm Kino Films. The announcement was timed to coincide with National Vietnam War Veterans Day on March 29.
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