VENICE - Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto's film Nelson, Did You Kill Anyone?, which is competing for the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival in Italy, received a standing ovation lasting about eight minutes following its official screening on September 4.
The film is among the entries in the competition section at the Venice International Film Festival, one of the world's three major film festivals.
The audience gave the film a standing ovation lasting about eight minutes after the screening, raising expectations for Tsukamoto's chances of winning the festival's top prize, the Golden Lion.
Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? is based on the real-life experiences of Allen Nelson, an African American who served as a U.S. Marine in the Vietnam War and later became an outspoken antiwar campaigner. Shinya Tsukamoto's 116-minute film approaches the war from the unusual perspective of the person inflicting violence, focusing not only on what Nelson did in Vietnam but on the psychological destruction that followed him home.
Nelson grows up in a poor African American family in New York, surrounded by poverty and racial discrimination. At 18, he joins the Marine Corps in the hope that military service will provide a route out of those circumstances. His transformation begins during training, where he is conditioned to suppress hesitation, empathy and guilt and to think in terms of killing efficiently rather than questioning why he is being asked to kill.
After passing through Camp Hansen in Okinawa, Nelson is sent to the front lines of the Vietnam War in 1966. There, the abstract lessons of military training become reality. He is exposed to extreme violence and repeatedly takes human lives. The film emphasizes the gradual deadening of his emotional responses: killing becomes something he is trained and expected to do without hesitation, while the distinction between ordinary morality and the morality of the battlefield begins to collapse.
The film does not present Nelson simply as a victim of war. Its central concern is what Tsukamoto has described as the wounds carried by the perpetrator. Nelson has participated directly in violence against other people, and the story refuses to erase that responsibility. At the same time, it examines how a young man can be systematically transformed into someone capable of killing and what happens when he later has to live with the knowledge of what he has done.
When Nelson returns to the United States, the war effectively follows him home. He suffers severe psychological trauma and what would now be recognized as PTSD. Ordinary experiences become triggers: darkness, the sense that another person is nearby, smells associated with decomposing bodies and sudden explosive noises such as firecrackers can pull him back into memories of Vietnam. He becomes frightened by loud sounds and unable to escape the battlefield psychologically even though he is physically thousands of kilometers away.
His personal life deteriorates. His relationships with his family break down, and by the age of 23 he is thrown out of his home and becomes homeless. The contrast is central to the film's argument: the military taught him how to survive and kill in combat but left him poorly equipped to return to ordinary civilian life. The small amount of money he earned from military service is portrayed as insignificant compared with the psychological price he pays.
A crucial figure enters the story in the form of psychiatrist Neil Daniels, played by Geoffrey Rush. Daniels works with veterans and confronts Nelson directly through counseling rather than allowing him simply to suppress his memories. Their encounters form an important second strand of the film, as Nelson is gradually forced to acknowledge both what happened to him and what he himself did to others. Daniels' intervention becomes one of the forces keeping Nelson connected to life when he is at his lowest point.
The narrative also moves beyond Nelson's immediate postwar collapse. After eventually beginning to recover, the real Nelson transformed his experiences into a campaign against war. He spoke publicly about Vietnam and about what soldiers are required to do, eventually giving more than 1,200 talks across Japan. Rather than presenting himself as a heroic veteran, he described what he regarded as the brutal, senseless reality of warfare and repeatedly confronted audiences with the human consequences of killing.
Lily Franky plays Kuroi, a Japanese man who supports Nelson's later activities, linking the American veteran's experience with the period in which he begins speaking to Japanese audiences about war. The film was shot in New York, Vietnam, Thailand and Okinawa, allowing Tsukamoto to move between Nelson's childhood, military experience, combat memories, postwar trauma and later antiwar work.
Structurally, the movie reportedly intercuts three aspects of Nelson's life: his experiences as a young Marine in Vietnam, his traumatic postwar existence and counseling sessions with Daniels, and the older Nelson speaking publicly about what happened. This means the film is less a conventional battlefield narrative than a psychological examination of how violence continues long after a soldier leaves the battlefield.
The title, Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, goes directly to the film's central moral question. The story does not merely ask whether war traumatizes soldiers. It asks what it means for a person to have killed other human beings, how a society trains someone to cross that boundary, whether that responsibility can ever be separated from the system that produced it, and whether a person who has participated in killing can find a meaningful way to live afterward.
Tsukamoto therefore treats Nelson's life as both an individual tragedy and an antiwar argument. The battlefield creates victims on both sides, but the film deliberately concentrates on a less commonly depicted wound: the damage suffered by someone who survives after having been made into a perpetrator. Nelson's eventual decision to tell younger generations what he experienced becomes his attempt to turn that burden into a warning against repeating it.
Source: TBS
