Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle

Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle is a French-language drama about Hiroo Onoda, a young Japanese intelligence officer sent to Lubang, a small Philippine island, in 1944 as American forces close in. Trained for covert work, he adopts a doctrine that rejects suicide and treats the assigned mission as absolute: he and a handful of soldiers are to keep fighting until Japanese troops return. Japan surrenders soon after, but Onoda does not. For roughly ten thousand days he continues a private war in the jungle, sustained by duty and by the belief that the war has not ended.

Arthur Harari directs and co-wrote the screenplay with Vincent Poymiro; Nicolas Anthomé produced. The film runs 167 minutes and was made for about 5 million dollars as a co-production between Germany, Belgium, Italy, Cambodia, France and Japan. Yuya Endo plays the young Onoda and Kanji Tsuda the older one, with Yuya Matsuura, Tetsuya Chiba, Shinsuke Kato and Kai Inowaki among the 26 credited cast members. It was Harari's first feature in the director's chair, preceding The Unknown in 2026.

On IMDb the film holds 7.2/10 from around 3,400 votes, and on TMDB 7.1/10 from roughly 159 votes. A critics' rating of 7.7/10 from 35 reviews places it somewhat above the audience scores, suggesting stronger approval from reviewers than from general viewers.