Hot Docs - The Young Man Was (Part 1: United Red Army)

 

Rating: **1/2

I don’t know if director Naeem Mohaiemen is a genius, but he’s blazed a trail for a completely new style of documentary filmmaking: the minimalist footage documentary. You see, The Young Man Was (Part 1: United Red Army) is more the type of documentary you read than watch. Much of the film is text against a black screen transcribing the communications from a hostage crisis 35-years-ago, the rest is a limited amount of archival footage, and clips of a bizarre 6-part British spy show from the 60s.

The subject is the 1977 hijacking of flight JAL 472 by the Japanese Red Army. The drama unfolded over 80 hours, and while many were captivated to the then unprecedented 24-hour media coverage, one boy, Mohaiemen himself, tuned into his TV hoping to watch The Zoo Gang, a TV series about World War II spies reuniting to get revenge for one of their own who was killed.

The politics of this hijacking, if you don’t remember first hand the era, might require you a couple of minutes of internet research or more to get up to speed. That’s one of the problems with the film, not context; who were the Japanese Red Army? Where did they come from? Where did they go? Why is this affair important to broader history? On the other hand, I don’t think this is supposed to be a history lesson, which is fine. There’s a bizarre kind of real time aspect to the film. You’re trying to understand what’s happening and you’re going on very little information, as if watching a current event unfolding on TV, which I liked.

Mohaiemen’s chosen format is compelling, although probably not to everyone’s taste. What I think it does capture well is the kind of absurdist nature of this crisis, various conversations and the limited-English of both the hijackers and hostage negotiators is almost hilarious in places given the seriousness of the situation. I applaud Mohaiemen for stretching the bounds of what a documentary can do and how it does it, but at the same time it kind of stretches one’s patience in places too. Ultimately, you will either go with it or you won’t, and for the most part I went with it.