SMASHING THE 0-LINE

“Exemplifies the kind of Japanese crime film that could never have been made in America at the time. Amps up the sex and violence to a degree surprising for the era, and defies the assertion that Seijun Suzuki’s best works were made in opposition to studio mandates.” -- Marc Walkow, Film Comment

Now available for the first time ever outside Japan, SMASHING THE 0-LINE is a high point in the first five years of director Seijun Suzuki’s career within Nikkatsu’s “Borderless Action” series. Drawing inspiration from Hollywood and the French New Wave, Suzuki’s works for Nikkatsu blended East and West, movie-fuelled fantasies and gritty realities of life in postwar Japan. Here, we follow two reporters’ descent into a scabrous demimonde of drug and human trafficking.