'Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence' Director: Nagisa Ōshima (1983) Arrow Academy Blu-ray | Japanese and English w/ English subtitles

David Bowie and Tom Conti star in Nagisa Ōshima's portrait of resilience, pride, friendship and obsession among four very different men confined in the stifling jungle heat of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Java during World War II.

The film was the first English-language outing by Ōshima (Death by Hanging, In the Realm of the Senses), a leading light of Japanese New Wave cinema, and provided breakthrough big-screen roles for comedian Takeshi Kitano and musician Ryūichi Sakamoto, who also composed the film's hauntingly memorable score. This powerful wartime drama was adapted from Laurens van der Post's autobiographical novel The Seed and the Sower (1963) by screenwriter Paul Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth).

Special features include:
 - The Man Who Left His Soul on Film (1983), Paul Joyce's 82-minute documentary profile of Nagisa Oshima
- The Oshima Gang (1983), a 30-minute documentary following the film's cast and makers at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival
- Interviews with producer Jeremy Thomas and actor-composer Ryuichi Sakamoto
- Interview with critic Tony Rayns
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork