Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle

Arthur Harari, 2021 (165m)

Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle

In 1944, the Japanese army sends 22-year-old specialist Hiroo Onoda to the island of Lubang in the Philippines with orders to coordinate a guerilla warfare campaign against soon-to-arrive American troops. He joins a small group of soldiers, who continue the fight despite increasingly hopeless conditions. Soon, word begins to trickle through that the war is over. Onoda and three other soldiers refuse to surrender or even believe that the war has ended. They decide to stay hidden in the jungle, engaging in occasional violent skirmishes with locals and the officials sent to convince them to leave. As his already small squad starts to dwindle, Onoda only grows more committed to his cause - a desperate, lonely mission that will ultimately last decades. Loosely based on an extraordinary true story, Onoda is a vivid take on one of the strangest chapters of World War II and its aftermath. It’s a captivating, sometimes startling insight into the experiences of Onoda and other ‘Japanese holdouts’ who continued to fight long after the war had ended.

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