Independent Japanese filmmaker Tsukamoto Shinya's new film "Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?" is premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, marking the culmination of a decade-long shift in his work towards examining the causes and perpetrators of real-world violence. The film dramatises the true story of Allen Nelson, an American Vietnam War veteran well known in Japan for the more than 1,200 talks he gave there about his wartime experiences, as he confronts his past through sessions with a counsellor. Tsukamoto says the project reflects his ongoing anxiety that Japan could be drawn closer to war amid current global tensions, a concern that has persisted since he made "Fires on the Plain" in 2014.

The film adapts Nelson's autobiography, which Tsukamoto first encountered while researching "Fires on the Plain", and is shot entirely from Nelson's subjective viewpoint, with no objective camera angles. Rodney Hicks plays Nelson, while Geoffrey Rush, cast at the insistence of producer Kinoshita Group to secure a globally recognisable actor, plays his counsellor. Despite being Tsukamoto's biggest-budget feature to date, it was made using his customary hands-on methods, including operating the camera himself, with a core Japanese crew supplemented by international collaborators. Tsukamoto says the film asks whether societies should keep sending young people to war, arguing that ordinary decent individuals can be turned into killers by the demands of the battlefield.