Happiness Avenue

Director: Katsuyuki Hirano

1986 / 93min / DCP

Part documentary, part performance art, and part riot, Hirano’s Happiness Avenue opens with footage of a group of right-wingers as they demand the return of the Kuril Islands to Japan, then dives into gleeful anarchy that’s in stark contrast to the humorless discipline of the nationalist groups, following a cast of unloosed rowdies—Sion Sono among them—as they run amok in Shizuoka, letting loose with a blitzkrieg of puerile pranks and general bad behavior that ends in the town’s sewage system. A cackling “fuck you” from Hirano, who would later turn his talents to documentaries about bicycle tours and avant-garde pornography.