Dir. Shane O’Sullivan, Ireland/UK/Germany, 2010, 92 mins
Cast: Bettina Röhl, May Shigenobu
Review by Carol Allen
The two women referred to in the title are quite literally “children of the revolution”. Bettina Röhl, daughter of Ulrike Meinhof of the Baader Meinhof late sixties/early seventies German terrorist group, and May Shigenobu, whose mother Fusako Shigenobu was leader of the Japanese Red Army, supporting the Palestinians in that same era.
There are a lot of very good things about this documentary. The two main interviewees have fascinating stories to tell. Bettina spent much of her childhood separated from her mother, was kidnapped as a child by the Baader Meinhof group to be re-educated in Palestine and only escaped her fate (the camp was bombed and nearly everyone killed) by the skin of her teeth. May spent her first twenty eight years as a non-existent person with no official nationality, moving around the Middle East and other parts of the world with her mother. They both come over as articulate and surprisingly well adjusted and confident women in view of their childhood experiences.
Director O’Sullivan has also done some excellent film research in terms of accessing relevant archive footage to illuminate the political background of the story and most importantly to show us the two mothers in their revolutionary heyday. Ulrike committed suicide in prison in 1976; Fusako was eventually captured and is serving a twenty year sentence in the Tokyo Detention Centre. The film also comes up with the interesting theory, put forward by one of Ulrike’s friends, who is now a psychologist, that it was the brain operation she had when young, which changed her personality and turned her into a terrorist.
The film does sometimes get bogged down in the detail of the terrorist activities of the two women and their colleagues and the twin stories of Ulrike and Fusako and their daughters don’t always mesh together quite as neatly as they might. But to be fair, that’s an issue when aiming to tell as story factually as opposed to shaping it into dramatic fiction – reference the 2008 feature The Baader Meinhof Complex.
The film makes no particular moral judgements – just presents its story – but something which comes over quite poignantly is in the interviews with Ulrike and Fusako’s fellow revolutionaries, now elderly men and women looking back on their youthful idealism. All that carnage, all those wasted lives, which failed to achieve the socialist utopia of which they dreamed, much of which is no longer remembered or indeed never known by many of today’s young people. It puts into context the “terrorist threat” of today, about which politicians and the media wax so concerned. It’s all happened before and for most people, it’s forgotten. Perhaps this film should be mandatory viewing for any young person considering trying to change the world via a career in terrorism. It very rarely does the business.
Extras on DVD include: Bonus track of O’Sullivan’s earlier documentary Under the Skin about radical film making and politics in Japan in the sixties, which provided the impetus for Children of the Revolution.
love to know what you think of some of my work and music videos 
