Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel • 2017 • France
Starring Issei Sagawa

A provocative, deeply unsettling sensory experience, CANIBA reflects on the discomfiting significance of cannibalistic desire in human existence through the prism of one Japanese man, Issei Sagawa, and his mysterious relationship with his brother, Jun Sagawa. In 1981, as a thirty-two-year-old student at the Sorbonne in Paris, Issei Sagawa was arrested when spotted emptying two bloody suitcases containing the remains of his Dutch classmate, Renée Hartevelt, whom days earlier he had killed and begun eating. Declared legally insane, Sagawa now lives as a free man in Japan, earning a living off his crime by writing novels, drawing manga, reenacting the murder for documentaries and sexploitation films, and even working as a food critic. Darkly compelling, CANIBA is both a daring formal experiment and a disturbing investigation of the ultimate taboo.