About My Liberty

In 2015 and 2016, Japan witnessed the biggest student protest movement since the 1960s. The cause was a bill by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party that would allow Japan, for the first time since the country’s surrender in 1945, to send troops to foreign countries. Director Takahash Nishibara’s film focuses on one organisation, Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (SEALD). SEALDs’ leaders, in their early twenties, include two young men, Aki Okuda, Yoshimas Ushida and the one woman, Mana Shibata, well-read, media-savvy activists who carefully strategised and executed the popular campaign against the bill.