‘Opus,’ the Farewell of Japanese Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, Will Premiere at Venice Film Festival 

In this photo provided by 2022 Kab Inc., Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto performs piano in a new film “Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus,” directed by Neo Sora, which is making its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival next month. (2022 Kab Inc. via AP)
In this photo provided by 2022 Kab Inc., Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto performs piano in a new film “Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus,” directed by Neo Sora, which is making its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival next month. (2022 Kab Inc. via AP)
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‘Opus,’ the Farewell of Japanese Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, Will Premiere at Venice Film Festival 

In this photo provided by 2022 Kab Inc., Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto performs piano in a new film “Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus,” directed by Neo Sora, which is making its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival next month. (2022 Kab Inc. via AP)
In this photo provided by 2022 Kab Inc., Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto performs piano in a new film “Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus,” directed by Neo Sora, which is making its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival next month. (2022 Kab Inc. via AP)

Sitting alone before a grand piano in a stark studio, Ryuichi Sakamoto takes the listener on a journey of his life, playing 20 of his compositions.

Shot entirely in black and white, on three 4K cameras, the film “Opus,” directed by Neo Sora, is the Japanese composer’s farewell, poetic yet bold, and deeply heartfelt.

Its world premiere is set for the Venice International Film Festival next month. The filming took place over several days, just a half year before his death on March 28 at 71.

Sakamoto had been battling cancer since 2014, and could no longer do concert performances, and so he turned to film.

He plays pieces he had never performed on solo piano. He delivers a striking, new slow-tempo arrangement of “Tong Poo,” a composition from his early days with techno-pop Yellow Magic Orchestra that catapulted him to stardom in the late 1970s when Asian musicians still tended to be marginal in the West.

“I felt utterly hollow afterward, and my condition worsened for about a month,” Sakamoto says in a statement.

He speaks only a few lines in the film.

“I need a break. This is tough. I’m pushing myself,” he says barely audibly in Japanese, about midway through the film.

He also says, “let’s go again,” indicating he wants to play a sequence again.

For the rest of the nearly two-hour film, he lets his piano do the talking.

The notes resonate from his fingers, lovingly shot in closeups, sometimes slowly, one pensive note at a time. Other times, they come jamming in those majestically Asian-evocative chords that have defined his sound.

After each piece, he lifts his hands up from the keys and holds them there in the air.

“Opus” is a testament to Sakamoto’s legendary filmography. He composed for some of the world’s greatest auteurs, including Bernardo Bertolucci, Brian DePalma, Takashi Miike, Alejandro G. Inarritu, Peter Kominsky and Nagisa Oshima.

The film is also evidence he remained active until the very end. He performs an excerpt from his meditative final album “12,” released earlier this year.

By the time Sakamoto starts playing the melody from Bertolucci’s 1987 “The Last Emperor,” the emotions are almost overwhelming. The soundtrack, which also included musician David Byrne, won both an Oscar and a Grammy.

Sora, the director, who was raised in New York and Tokyo, says he and the crew were determined to capture the sense of time and timelessness, so crucial in Sakamoto’s art, in what everyone knew might be his final performance.

All the sounds that usually get taken out in post-production, rustling clothing, clicking nails or Sakamoto’s breathing, were purposely kept, not minimized in the mix.

“Part of the reason why we decided to shoot in black and white was because we thought that also highlighted the physicality of his body, with the black and white keys of the piano,” said Sora, named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2020.

Sakamoto first came up with a set list, and the filmmakers worked out with him in advance a detailed plan for a visual narrative and concept.

Designed as a film from the get-go, not just a documentary of a performance, the work features the lighting design, artful long takes and Zoom-lens closeups concocted by Bill Kirstein, the director of photography.

“We were able to get shots of hands and keys that we were never able to get before,” said Kirstein, comparing the film’s imagery to a drawing.

Hundreds of pounds of weights were laid on the floor so the camera dolly could move silently without creaking.

A memorable moment comes toward the end when Sakamoto plays “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” from the 1983 Oshima film bearing the same title and starring David Bowie and Golden Lion-winner Takeshi Kitano.

Sakamoto also acted in the film, portraying a World War II Japanese soldier who commands a prisoner-of-war camp. He was young, barely in his 30s. Yet in so many ways he remained unchanged as that frail silver-haired bespectacled man, crouched over his piano.

As the film moves to the final tune, Sakamoto has disappeared, gone to that other world that some call heaven. The piano, under a spotlight, is playing on its own, a reminder his music is eternal, and still here.



Fans Criticize Beyoncé for Shirt Calling Native Americans 'the Enemies of Peace'

Beyonce, center, attends the men's Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2026 collection, that was presented in Paris, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
Beyonce, center, attends the men's Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2026 collection, that was presented in Paris, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
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Fans Criticize Beyoncé for Shirt Calling Native Americans 'the Enemies of Peace'

Beyonce, center, attends the men's Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2026 collection, that was presented in Paris, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
Beyonce, center, attends the men's Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2026 collection, that was presented in Paris, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

A T-shirt worn by Beyoncé during a Juneteenth performance on her “Cowboy Carter” tour has sparked a discussion over how Americans frame their history and caused a wave of criticism for the Houston-born superstar.

The T-shirt worn during a concert in Paris featured images of the Buffalo Soldiers, who belonged to Black US Army units active during the late 1800s and early 1900s. On the back was a lengthy description of the soldiers that included

“Their antagonists were the enemies of peace, order and settlement: warring Indians, bandits, cattle thieves, murderous gunmen, bootleggers, trespassers, and Mexican revolutionaries.”

Images of the shirt and videos of the performance are also featured on Beyoncé’s website, The Associated Press reported.

As she prepares to return to the US for performances in her hometown this weekend, fans and Indigenous influencers took to social media to criticize Beyoncé for framing Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries as anything but the victims of American imperialism and promoting anti-Indigenous language.

A publicist for Beyoncé did not respond to requests for comment.

Who were the Buffalo Soldiers? The Buffalo Soldiers served in six military units created after the Civil War in 1866. They were comprised formerly enslaved men, freemen, and Black Civil War soldiers and fought in hundreds of conflicts — including in the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II — until they were disbanded in 1951.

As the quote on Beyoncé’s shirt notes, they also fought numerous battles against Indigenous peoples as part of the US Army's campaign of violence and land theft during the country's westward expansion.

Some historians say the moniker “Buffalo Soldiers” was bestowed by the tribes who admired the bravery and tenacity of the fighters, but that might be more legend than fact. “At the end of the day, we really don’t have that kind of information,” said Cale Carter, director of exhibitions at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston.

Carter and other museum staff said that, only in the past few years, the museum made broader efforts to include more of the complexities of the battles the Buffalo Soldiers fought against Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries and the role they played in the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. They, much like many other museums across the country, are hoping to add more nuance to the framing of American history and be more respectful of the ways they have caused harm to Indigenous communities.

“We romanticize the Western frontier,” he said. “The early stories that talked about the Buffalo Soldiers were impacted by a lot of those factors. So you really didn’t see a changing in that narrative until recently.”

There has often been a lack of diverse voices discussing the way Buffalo Soldiers history is framed, said Michelle Tovar, the museum's director of education. The current political climate has put enormous pressure on schools, including those in Texas, to avoid honest discussions about American history, she said.

“Right now, in this area, we are getting push back from a lot of school districts in which we can’t go and teach this history," Tovar said. "We are a museum where we can at least be a hub, where we can invite the community regardless of what districts say, invite them to learn it and do what we can do the outreach to continue to teach honest history.”

Historians scrutinize reclamation motive Beyoncé's recent album “Act II: Cowboy Carter” has played on a kind of American iconography, which many see as her way of subverting the country music genre's adjacency to whiteness and reclaiming the cowboy aesthetic for Black Americans. Last year, she became the first Black woman ever to top Billboard's country music chart, and “Cowboy Carter” won her the top prize at the 2025 Grammy Awards, album of the year.

“The Buffalo Soldiers play this major role in the Black ownership of the American West,” said Tad Stoermer, a historian and professor at Johns Hopkins University. “In my view, (Beyoncé is) well aware of the role that these images play. This is the ‘Cowboy Carter’ tour for crying out loud. The entire tour, the entire album, the entire piece is situated in this layered narrative.”

But Stoermer also points out that the Buffalo Soldier have been framed in the American story in a way that also plays into the myths of American nationalism.

As Beyoncé’s use of Buffalo Soldiers imagery implies, Black Americans also use their story to claim agency over their role in the creation of the country, said Alaina E. Roberts, a historian, author and professor at Pittsburgh University who studies the intersection of Black and Native American life from the Civil War to present day.

“That’s the category in which she thought maybe she was coming into this conversation, but the Buffalo Soldiers are even a step above that because they were literally involved in not just the settlement of the West but of genocide in a sense,” she said.

Online backlash builds ahead of Houston shows Several Native influencers, performers, and academics took to social media this week to criticize Beyoncé or call the language on her shirt anti-Indigenous. “Do you think Beyoncé will apologize (or acknowledge) the shirt,” indigenous.tv, an Indigenous news and culture Instagram account with more than 130,000, asked in a post Thursday.
Many of her critics, as well as fans, agree. A flood of social media posts called out the pop star for the historic framing on the shirt.

“The Buffalo Soldiers are an interesting historical moment to look at. But we have to be honest about what they did, especially in their operations against Indigenous Americans and Mexicans,” said Chisom Okorafor, who posts on TikTok under the handle @confirmedsomaya.

Okorafor said there is no “progressive” way to reclaim America's history of empire building in the West, and that Beyoncé’s use of Western symbolism sends a problematic message.

“Which is that Black people too can engage in American nationalism," she said. "Black people too can profit from the atrocities of American empire. It is a message that tells you to abandon immigrants, Indigenous people, and people who live outside of the United States. It is a message that tells you not only is it a virtue to have been born in this country but the longer your line extends in this country the more virtuous you are.”