Nagisa Oshima's THE CEREMONY (Japan, 1971)

Told in flashback. A Japanese mother and son return to Japan from Manchuria after World War Two. The mother hopes to live without contact with her late husband's family but they are essentially captured by them when they come back.

After that, over the years, the boy learns more and more about the wealthy degenerate fascist family each time they gather for a wedding or a funeral.

The first is a ceremony on the first anniversary of his father's suicide. He learns that his grandfather is probably his father and his father was most likely his half-brother. All the incest in the family makes it difficult to know exactly how everyone is related. At one point, he realizes that the girl he's in love with is his half-sister.

That girl's father was a low level war criminal imprisoned in China. Most of the men in the family SHOULD have been locked up but got away with it and are eventually allowed to re-enter government.

It might make a good double feature with The Thick-Walled Room (Japan, 1956) about low level Japanese war criminals in Sugamo prison which was mentioned by name in The Ceremony. It has some of the same elements, complaints that mainly low level war criminals were imprisoned while the worst went free. The Thick-Walled Room went into politics a little more---one of the prisoner's Communist brother visits and talks about protests against the Korean war and the rearmament of Japan. In The Ceremony, the boy's Communist uncle was portrayed as a buffoon, which may have been fair considering his bourgeois origins.

Both films are available on The Criterion Channel.