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Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle

Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (Japanese: ONODA 一万夜を越えて, Hepburn: Onoda: Ichiman'ya o Koete, lit."Onoda: Over ten thousand nights", French: Onoda, 10 000 nuits dans la jungle) is a 2021 adventure drama film directed by Arthur Harari and written by the director and Vincent Poymiro, with the collaboration of Bernard Cendron, freely inspired by the life of Hiroo Onoda. It is an international co-production between France, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Cambodia.

The film stars Yuya Endo as Onoda, a Japanese soldier who refused to believe that World War II had ended and continued to fight on a remote Philippine island until 1974. It is particularly inspired by Cendron and Gérard Chenu's 1974 biography Onoda, seul en guerre dans la jungle and on Cendron's archives and Harari's conversations with him. It is not based on Onoda's own memoirs, and Harari considers the film fiction inspired by history rather than a biographical film.

Cast

Release

The film opened the Un Certain Regard section of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival on 7 July 2021.

It was released in cinemas in the United Kingdom and Ireland by Third Window Films on 15 April 2022.

Critical reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 97% of 30 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.70/10. The website's consensus reads: "With absorbing patience and palpable empathy, Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle finds poignant drama in one real-life soldier's stubborn pursuit of honor." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 78 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

On RogerEbert.com, Ben Kenigsburg writes: "Technically, "Onoda"... is a biopic, but it never plays like one. This austere, bleak, occasionally even darkly funny film is, at nearly three hours, more like an absurdist slow burn." James Lattimer, writing for Sight and Sound, called it "...a nearly three-hour wannabe existentialist war drama intended as an exercise in the sort of big-screen immersion that has been impossible of late... [T]he film's humdrum dramatization lacks the necessary visual or narrative finesse to keep viewers absorbed."

Accolades

The film won the Prix Louis-Delluc for 2021. At the 11th Magritte Awards, it received a nomination in the category of Best Foreign Film in Coproduction.