Nagisa Oshima is back on the Croisette with Gohatto (Taboo) after a 14-year absence from directing a feature film. Veteran Cannes festival-goers look back with nostalgia to that famous "broken" festival of 1968, when Oshima sided with rebellious students and a phalanx of French auteur directors (Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut) to dramatically announce the withdrawal of his Japanese entry, Death By Hanging, from the main programme. A year later, Pierre-Henri Deleau invited Oshima to participate in the Directors' Fortnight, the newly founded alternative festival housed in the Cinéma Le Français on the Rue d-Antibes, to which he came with The Diary Of A Shinjuku Burglar, while Death By Hanging was given an honorary showing in a sidebar.

modelled after the Directors' Fortnight. It caused a scandal ­ the film was impounded and the Forum's Ulrich Gregor accused of showing pornography. Gregor, however, had only to point to the Cannes screenings ­ 13 by official count ­ and the case was promptly dropped.

The story doesn't end there. In 1978, Gilles Jacob invited Oshima to show his Empire Of The Passions in the competition, a reflective, philosophical sequel to In The Realm Of The Senses ­ and Oshima was awarded Best Director. Jacob invited him back to Cannes in 1983 with Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, and he was here again in 1986 with Max Mon Amour, a French production remarkable for its wit.

the guardians of public morality and was only shown in selected venues. But it was Night And Fog In Japan that ended his relationship with the studio system: a portrayal of assassinated socialist leader Inejiro Asanuma with an added statement on political agitation in Japan, it was banned after four days of release.

Oshima has struggled to find international backing for his large-scale projects. He'd wanted to make a film in the United States, called Hollywood Zen, about the meeting of the actors Sessue Hayakawa and Rudolph Valentino, but the project failed at the last minute for financial reasons. "That's when I decided to go back to Japan to make a film with a more reasonable budget ­ and that film was Gohatto," says Oshima. "Unfortunately, after I made the announcement that I was going ahead with this film, I had a stroke and had to take a three-year break."

Better translated as "the rule" than as "taboo", Gohatto is set in 1865 and focuses on the fall of the Shogun Tokugawa and the restoration of the Meiji Emperor. "When I was a child, I was fascinated by this period and by the Shinsengumi, a group of samurai opposed to the restoration of the Meiji," he says.

This being the end of the samurai epoch, a popular theme in Japanese cinema, the film probes some reasons for the tragedy of samurai sacrificing themselves for the weak and disintegrating Tokugawa rulers. Oshima claims that when you have a group of men, there always exists some aspect of homosexuality, which is the taboo theme that lends Gohatto its specific attraction and, if you will, its radical political statement.

Ron Holloway