Toshio Matsumoto's breakthrough feature-length debut is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the vibrant countercultures in post-war Japan. Produced by Art Theatre Guild, the independent cinema production and distribution company at the heart of the Japanese New Wave, Funeral Parade of Roses centres on Eddie, a charismatic drag queen who contends with professional rivalries and wrestles with demons of the past while working in Tokyo’s flourishing gay bar scene.

The film bristles with New Wave cultural references and documentation of the era’s avant-garde movement. Funeral Parade of Roses combines nonfiction interviews, distorted television footage, manipulated images, and bewildering staged vignettes with dizzying camera angles and mind-bending crosscuts—all attesting to the anxieties of a modernising Japan caught in the throes of sociopolitical change and fomenting unrest. A psychedelic adaptation of the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, Funeral Parade of Roses captures the spirit of the times within a paradox of youth and queer identity.

Toshio Matsumoto (1932–2017), a pioneer of experimental moving images in Japan, and a visual arts theorist and critic. Early in his career, he explored his own views on postwar Japanese society as a documentary filmmaker. Matsumoto worked closely with the art group Jikken Kobo ('Experimental Workshop') in the early days, and is known for his avant-garde works such as Silver Wheel (1955) and Poem of Stone (1963), which was composed by composer Toru Takemitsu, one of the Jikken Kobo ('Experimental Workshop') members. Matsumoto explores structuralism and abstract film and electronic music, and has taught for many years at Kyoto University of the Arts and Nihon University School of Art.