Nackt und verdammt

Seijun Suzuki is one of Japan's most unconventional filmmakers, a stylist who is celebrated in the West primarily for his gangster films. In Naked and Damned, however, he takes us to the battlefield of the Second World War, more precisely to occupied China. There, the prostitute Harumi finds herself as a "troop carer" for the Japanese soldiers and is soon caught between the fronts herself: A sadistic captain wants to turn her into his sex slave, while she falls in love with his shy adjutant ... A bitter martyrdom of love and death and at the same time an unembellished reckoning with the crimes of her own countrymen, captured on celluloid in powerful black-and-white Cinemascope.