Sabu's 'Arrested Memory' Screens at Venice After a 19-Year Journey Through Four Countries
A script the Japanese filmmaker Sabu wrote in 2007 finally reaches a festival screen on September 8, 2026, at the Venice Film Festival's PalaBiennale venue, having travelled through Germany, France, South Korea and Japan before landing as a Chinese-language action-comedy shot in Taiwan.
Sabu — known by a single name, a former metalworker turned director whose early films built a cult following in the late 1990s — wrote Arrested Memory by combining two things he saw in the air at the time: the tough-guy cop trend then dominating Japanese cinema, and mounting media coverage of Alzheimer's and dementia among Japan's ageing population, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The film's protagonist, Lee, is a superstar police detective in Taipei haunted by guilt after losing his team during a crime investigation, per the official Biennale synopsis. Taiwanese actor Ethan Juan plays Lee, who is diagnosed with early-onset dementia and transferred to a new precinct. The plot turns on the kidnapping of a local Japanese tycoon's son — a deliberate riff, Sabu says, on Akira Kurosawa's 1963 thriller High and Low, in which a shoe executive faces a ransom demand for a child he believes is his own but turns out to be his chauffeur's.
What makes the project stand out is the long road it took to get made. Before Taiwan, Arrested Memory was nearly produced in Germany, France, South Korea and Japan, with each version falling short of a greenlight. The Taiwan shoot marked Sabu's first time working in a production environment outside Japan. The finished film is an 87-minute Taiwan-Japan co-production in Mandarin, Taiwanese and Japanese, listed on the TIFF programme.
Venice programmed Arrested Memory in its Venice Open – Out of Competition section, a strand for films that fall outside the main competition. A public screening is set for September 8 at 17:00 at the PalaBiennale, with admission by ticket; a separate pass-holder screening at the same time and venue was listed on the Biennale's 2026 programme. A trailer was unveiled ahead of the festival dates, per Variety.
Venice is the world premiere. The North American premiere follows at the Toronto International Film Festival, as confirmed by both Variety and TIFF's site. The back-to-back festival circuit is the standard corridor for films seeking distribution attention — Venice launches the title for the European market and the trade press, while Toronto puts it in front of North American buyers.
For fans of Sabu's early work, the film is described as a throwback in story and style to three films that established him: Dangan Runner (1996), Postman Blues (1997) and Monday (2000). Those titles earned him a reputation for kinetic, genre-blending narratives with dark-comic edges. Arrested Memory returns to that register after two decades away from it — and after a script that waited nearly as long.
