One of Japan’s most notorious and—in international terms—culpably under-exposed films. Shocking, beautiful and moving in equal measure, Red Angel is one of Masumura’s very finest achievements. During the Sino-Japanese war in 1939, an angelic young military nurse is raped by her patients, then sent to the front line for daring to register a complaint. Posted to a rag-tag, demoralised unit, she falls in love with an impotent, morphine-addicted surgeon. Together the pair seek mutual solace, as all around them disease, brutality and carnage threatens to sweep their humanity away.