Skip to main content

Interview with a Cannibal

30 years ago, a Japanese man named Issei Sagawa walked to the Bois de Boulogne, a park on the outskirts of Paris, carrying two suitcases. The contents of those suitcases, to the lament of a nearby jogger, was the dismembered body of a fellow student – a Dutch woman named Renée Hartevelt, whom Sagawa had shot three days prior and had spent the days since eating various parts of her body.
He was soon arrested. According to reports, Issei uttered, “I killed her to eat her flesh,” when they raided his home, whereupon they found bits of Renne still in his fridge.
Sagawa was declared insane and unfit for trial and was institutionalized in Paris. His incarceration was to be short, however, as the French public soon grew weary of their hard-earned francs going to support this evil woman-eater, and Issei was promptly deported. Herein followed a bizarre and seemingly too convenient set of legal loopholes and psychiatric reports that led doctors in Japan declaring him “sane, but evil.”
On August 12, 1986, Sagawa checked himself out of Tokyo’s Matsuzawa Psychiatric hospital, and has been a free man ever since.


If you enjoyed this you can also watch The Cannibal that Walked Free.




Popular posts from this blog

Manufacturing Consent

The classic Canadian documentary Manufacturing Consent based on the Noam Chomsky/Edward Herman book by the same name. Explores the the propaganda model of the media.

The Ringworm Children

Directed by David Belhassen and Asher Hemias. The documentary won the award for "Best Documentary" at the Haifa International Film Festival and was featured as a documentary at the Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles in 2007.

In the Shadow of the Moon

Between 1968 and 1972, nine American spacecraft voyaged to the Moon, and 12 men walked upon its surface. They remain the only human beings to have stood on another world. In the Shadow of the Moon brings together for the first, and very possibly the last, time surviving crew members from every single Apollo mission which flew to the Moon, and allows them to tell their story in their own words. The definitive story of going to the moon, told by those who went. Between 1969 and 1972 an elite group of men achieved an incredible dream. They were, and remain, the only human beings to set foot on a planet other than our own. These personal testimonies are interwoven with digitally remastered footage from Nasa film archives, much of it previously unseen and all of it hauntingly evocative of a bygone era. The result is an intimate and epic film which vividly communicates the daring and the danger, the pride and the passion, of this band of special young men.