The pioneering independent production and distribution company Art Theatre Guild, or ATG, was a driving and centrifugal force that inspired and intertwined the most significant avant-garde currents transforming Japanese cinema of the Sixties and Seventies. Founded in 1961 as a distributor principally of foreign art films, with funding provided by the major Japanese studios led by Toho, ATG was envisioned as a promoter and incubator of radical and experimental cinema and a means of reaching the small but influential Japanese audience for more sophisticated, difficult and politically outspoken cinema. With its own chain of ten cinemas and a policy of giving each major feature a one-month run, ATG made possible cinematic experimentation of a kind and scale unprecedented in the Japanese cinema. An incredible cast of now canonical filmmakers including Nagisa Oshima, Kyju Yoshida, Masao Adachi, Kinju Wakamastu and Toshio Wakamatsu all realized among their most ambitious and audacious feature films as ATG productions. Veteran and first-time directors from Kaneto Shindo to Shuji Terayama also contributed major works to the ATG canon which is now being rediscovered and heralded as an apex of post-WWII Japanese cinema. Following the celebrated tributes to ATG recently unfurled in Paris and New York, this mini-retrospective offers a selection of classic works of Japanese counter-cinema little known in the US. As a centerpiece of this series we have included a three-film tribute to the late and extraordinarily great Nagisa Oshima. — Haden Guest