At a time when young Japanese documentarists have mostly turned to personal topics, there are still a few engaged in socially and politically committed filmmaking, and The Depth of the Truth is one of the better-made examples. Produced by Motohashi Yusuke as his graduation work for the Japan Academy of Moving Images, the film school run by Imamura Shohei and the critic Sato Tadao, the video thoroughly pursues the issue of reparations for Koreans charged with war crimes committed under the direction of the Japanese military in WWII.
Many know through such films as The Bridge Over the River Kwai of the railroad Japanese forces built through Burma using POWs as forced labor, but few are aware that many of its work supervisors were Korean civilian employees of the Japanese. Having the most contact with the prisoners, they became the direct enforcers of the Army's cruel policies and as a result 148 of them were executed or imprisoned as war criminals after the war.
The video follows a few of these survivors to paint a more complex story. Suffering under brutal Japanese colonial rule, many were forced into jobs which placed them at the bottom of a hierarchy that they, as the colonized, could do little to resist. After the war, they were tried as "Japanese war criminals," but once released, ironically received none of the benefits given to Japanese veterans under the pretext they were Korean. Survivors have sued for redress, but are ignored by a Japanese government that still refuses to examine its colonialist and militarist past.

Extremely well-researched for a student production, the documentary's authenticity as a historical record makes up for a lack of formal originality and a critical stance towards its own subjects.
--Aaron Gerow