Caniba

A thirty-two-year-old student in Paris, Issei Sagawa was arrested in 1981 when spotted emptying two bloody suitcases containing the remains of his classmate Renée Hartevelt. Two days earlier, he raped and then ate his way through her corpse. Declared legally insane, he returned to Japan. Ostracized from society, he has made his living off his crime, writing novels, drawing manga, appearing in films. He lives in a small home near Tokyo, with his brother Jun-san, his principal care giver. Rather than taking cover behind facile outrage, or creating a masquerade out of humanity’s voyeuristic attraction for the grotesque, this documentary treats cannibalistic desire and acts with the unnerving gravity they deserve, coming as close as anyone yet to the seemingly unexplainable.