Juichiro Yamasaki has never quite made it into the international critics' spotlight and rankings, nor into the specialist accounts of new Japanese cinema. Despite this blindness (voluntary or involuntary), we are faced with a defiant, iconoclastic creator with an enormous knowledge of his country's cinematic tradition. In this case, Yamasaki dares to take on the canonical genre in Japan and one of those with the greatest international scope, the jidai geki, normally set in the Tokugawa era (1608-1868). Yamasaki's approach, rather than the classic exponents represented by Kurosawa or Mizoguchi, has to do with the critical perspective and the rupturist impulse of filmmakers such as Nagisa Oshima or Masahiro Shinoda. Sanchu Uprising... makes a decidedly social re-reading of a genre that is little given to such perspectives. The uprising of the title is that of a group of peasants against the abusive taxes of the feudal lords. The defiance will have harsh consequences on the members of a community of workers who dare to challenge part of the established order. Yamasaki not only plays against the tide with his themes: his formal approach is also non-conformist and offers us some absolutely unexpected sequences, which don't exclude breaking the fourth wall, theatrical fragments and even animated scenes. Militancy, (in)dignity, rebellion and, finally, emotion, coexist in a work that reveals a filmmaker of deep humanism and surprising inventiveness. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH