Artist I Just Didn't Do It

 Masayuki Suo—a director better known in his native Japan for the 1996 romantic comedy Shall We Dance?—follows a wrongfully charged man through the draconian tangles of the Japanese justice system in the procedural thriller I Just Didn't Do It. Ryo Kase stars as a young commuter railroaded into jail when a schoolgirl accuses him of molesting her on a subway. When the film was released in 2007, Japan's criminal conviction rate hovered a fraction of a point under 100 percent, thanks in part to coerced confessions and the absence of juries. In other words, Kase is in a desperate position, proclaiming his innocence to a system that, in the film's view, barely acknowledges such a concept. 

Updated 02/08/2010