The Terrifying Tale of the Killer Cannibal Who Walked Free
In 1981, Issei Sagawa shot a beautiful Dutch woman and cannibalized her to, in his words, consume her energy. He is the subject of a disturbing new documentary.
TIFF
Does the world truly need a graphic documentary devoted to the life of Issei Sagawa, a notorious Japanese murderer who shot and cannibalized his classmate in Paris in 1981? That is the question raised by Vérena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Caniba (making its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival), which focuses on the aftermath of Sagawa’s grisly shooting of his fellow Sorbonne student Reneé Hartevelt, the rape of her corpse, and his subsequent consumption of her flesh over a two-day period.
Paravel and Castaing-Taylor are unlikely provocateurs. Both filmmakers are anthropologists that hail from Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, a launching pad for some of the most vital experimental work in contemporary documentary cinema. An opening credit expresses the filmmakers’ disclaimer that the film does not “seek to either justify or legitimize” Sagawa’s crimes. That being said, Caniba, which, in the spirit of other films made by the SEL, spurns any pretense of objectivity and offers viewers an “immersive” viewing experience, inevitably feeds off the macabre fascination with Sagawa’s psychosis that has made him something of a minor celebrity in Japan and even inspired songs by the Rolling Stones (“Too Much Blood”) and the English rock group The Stranglers (“La Folie”), which is played over the film’s end credits.
Amazingly enough, although Igawa was incarcerated in a French mental hospital for several years, he was eventually granted his freedom since, after being deported to Japan in 1986, the French charges against him had been dropped. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s film chronicles his recent life in Japan, in tandem with the only slightly less shocking (although fortunately non-homicidal) sexual obsessions of his brother Jun. For reasons that remain fuzzy, Jun, a less than wholly stable individual himself, has been entrusted with caring for his deranged brother.
