During the Second World War, the British soldier Jack Celliers is interned in a Japanese prison camp. His jailer, Yonoi, is obsessed with discipline, honour, glory, and secretly in love with him. Yonoi think the Allied prisoners are cowards to surrender rather than commit suicide. With Christmas approaching, captives and jailers alike realize that they have many more points in common than they could have imagined. In circumstances as difficult as war, men becomes unrecognizable, transformed into destructive animals, yet what remains is not simply a battle between prisoners and guards, but a struggle between two ways of understanding life and death.

The director of the acclaimed The Empire of the Senses delivered another cult 80s classic thanks to an unusual cast, which, besides Bowie, included Takeshi Kitano, one of the most important contemporary Japanese filmmakers (creator of Takeshi's Castle), and Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also composed the extraordinary soundtrack