The late 1960s marked a remarkably productive and creatively intense period for Oshima as he began to define a truly revolutionary approach to narrative. Death by Hanging marks a high point of these fertile years as one of Oshima's most potent, stylistically daring, and intensely debated works. His first film to draw the attention of international critics, Death by Hanging was inspired by the highly publicized death sentence received by a Korean youth for the strangling of two young female schoolmates. The film opens with a gripping documentary style reenactment of the execution that is suddenly derailed by an uncanny and inexplicable mishap, plunging the film into a dizzying mode of political theater where the authority of the executioners and truth claims of cinema are brilliantly put on trial. An uncompromising ode to Brechtian aesthetics, Death by Hanging is an awe inspiring and urgent work of political cinema.