4/5 stars
“We were taught to treat Asians like they were less than human,” says Allen Nelson in Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, a true-life drama about a former US Marine faced with a reckoning.
Screening in competition at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, this often powerful work is based on Nelson’s memoir of the same name. Somewhat surprisingly, Shinya Tsukamoto, the cult Japanese director behind Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) and Bullet Ballet (1998), adapted it in what is only his second English-language production.
As the end credits tell us, this New Yorker was buried in Japan; in that country alone, he gave more than 1,200 talks about his horrifying experiences in the Vietnam war. How he reaches the point of being able to share his trauma is the film’s true focus.
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