Unforgiven (2013)

Hollywood remakes Japanese films all the time. Japan remaking Hollywood is rarer. Japan remaking a film that was itself a spiritual descendant of Kurosawa? That's almost a closed loop.

Lee Sang-il's UNFORGIVEN (2013) is a Japanese-language remake of Clint Eastwood's 1992 Western, transplanted from the American frontier to Hokkaido during the early Meiji period - a moment when the samurai class was collapsing, the old order was dying, and the north of Japan was a lawless frontier where outcasts and fugitives went to disappear. The structural parallel to the Western is exact. The thematic resonance runs even deeper.

Lee has said he first saw Eastwood's Unforgiven at 19, and spent nearly 20 years thinking about how to remake it. He is a third-generation Zainichi Korean - Korean-Japanese - born and raised in Niigata. This gives his interest in stories about outsiders, assimilation, and erased identity a personal weight that shows up everywhere in the film. The inclusion of the Ainu - Hokkaido's indigenous people, whose lands were taken during the Meiji Restoration - adds a layer the original never had.

Clint Eastwood praised the film. That's the best result Lee said he could have hoped for.