Category: Japanese cinema

鹿の国 Shika no kuni/Guardians of the Harvest (Hiro Riko, 2025)

I’d been meaning to write something about 鹿の国 Guardians of the Harvest for months, but the documentary’s sheer scope, my fascination with the themes it explores (which led me, among other things, to discover the work of artist Ōkojima Maki) and, not least, the complexity of its construction kept getting in the way. In the end, its inclusion in this year’s Nippon Connection lineup, along with my collaboration with Sonatine covering the festival, gave me the excuse I needed to finally gather my thoughts into a review. I had originally planned to write a much longer essay instead….maybe another day….(This is a slightly different version of the review posted on Sonatine).

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“Ancient beliefs in Suwa are said to have centered around Mishaguji, the spirit of natural forces, or the power of nature that presides over the cycle of life and death. This was neither monotheism nor polytheistic animism, in the sense of folk traditions that revere a range of minor or localized “gods”. The formless and omnipresent Mishaguji spirit could be summoned by a shaman and could come to possess a piece of land, a tall tree, a large rock, or any other natural object (…) Although the ancient shamanistic Mishaguji cult lost its dominant position, its practices ‘snuck back’, as it were, into the rituals of the Suwa Shrine in Shinto disguise. The original spiritualism of Suwa had nothing to do with later Japanese Shintoism, and was in fact more similar to the shamanism that had existed for millennia in many parts of Asia.”
Matsuzawa Yutaka and the Spirit of Suwa, Shimada Yoshiko

During the three winter months of the Ōmuro Shinto ritual, the divine spirit Mishaguji is invoked into a young boy, who becomes the living deity known as the Ōhōri. He is then secluded within a semi-underground sanctuary called the Ōmuro, where numerous ritual performances are conducted before him throughout the winter. With the arrival of spring, the cycle culminates in the Ontōsai festival, during which seventy-five deer heads are offered to the Ōhōri in a ceremony symbolizing the renewal of life and the bond between humans, the divine, and the natural world.

Situated at the intersection of the Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line and the Central Tectonic Line, the Suwa basin occupies the geological heart of the Japanese archipelago. These fault lines are not merely geological fractures but channels through which myths, beliefs, and human movement have flowed for millennia. Parallel to the overlapping of religious practices, the documentary merges a visual anthropologic approach (producer Kitamura Minao would call it visual folklore) with a poetic one, reenactments, and with more experimental bits that make it one of the more unique non-fiction works coming out of the archipelago in recent years.

“Mishaguji, Misaguji, Misakuchi, Saguji, Sagu, Sago…” Over slow-motion images of a snow-covered forest, where deer silently leap through the trees, these words open Guardians of the Harvest, though I much prefer its Japanese title, Shika no kuni (The Land of Deer). Its central concerns are multiple and ultimately ineffable, much like the many names given to the spirits or deities that have inhabited this land throughout history. These names may refer to the same elusive presence, or perhaps they instead evoke the fluid, ever-changing power of the rituals, folk practices, and mythologies that have shaped the region across centuries.
The region is the Suwa Basin, in the Shinshū region—present-day Nagano Prefecture—and takes as its point of departure the unique religious culture surrounding Suwa Taisha, one of Japan’s oldest shrines. The shrine’s rituals and traditions preserve traces of belief systems that long predate institutional Shinto, offering a rare glimpse into layers of religious practice that have endured through centuries of transformation. Here, the ancient worship of the enigmatic Mishaguji (Misakuchi, Saguji, Sagu…) spirits intertwines with medieval Buddhist doctrines, hunting customs, and agricultural rites, forming a singular spiritual and material landscape in which disparate traditions continue to coexist and reshape one another.

Hiro, a filmmaker who lived and did field research in Nepal and in the Himalayas, together with producer Kitamura Minao—one of Japan’s foremost documentary filmmakers, still largely undiscovered outside the country, and someone who has studied the Suwa region for decades—structures the film around the changing seasons and the rituals associated with each stage of the year. Winter gradually gives way to spring, ceremonies unfold in step with the rhythms of the natural world, and the reconstruction of the medieval Ōmuro (great chamber) Shinto rite becomes less an exercise in historical reenactment than an attempt to recover a forgotten way of understanding life itself. The living deity embodied in a child and known as the Ōhōri, secluded for months within a semi-subterranean sanctuary; the ritual consumption of venison; performances offered to the gods; and, ultimately, the sacrifice of seventy-five deer heads all point toward a conception of existence in which human beings remain inseparable from the cycles that sustain them.

The reenactment of the Ōhōri ritual, performed by local residents, occupies a substantial portion of the documentary, which constantly shifts between these reconstructed ceremonies, breathtaking images of the Suwa Basin and Lake Suwa (at times drone photography is perhaps overused), scenes of rice planting and harvesting, and footage of communal gatherings and seasonal rites. A female narrator guides the film throughout, while the reconstructed Ōhōri sequences introduce a male voice whose less restrained, almost joyous delivery occasionally recalls that of a traditional town crier.

It is within these reenacted passages that one of the documentary’s few less convincing elements appears: the rather incongruous use of CGI to depict serpentine spirits. More problematic, at least for some viewers, are the graphic scenes of deer killing. Yet these moments are inseparable from the spiritual terrain the film seeks to investigate, even if they occasionally verge on, or can be percieved as, romanticizing an ancient way of life. Fortunately, Guardian of the Harvest never settles into a glorification of a mythical past, but it takes more the shape of a rigorous study. Moreover, its mosaic-like structure allows meanings to remain layered, ambiguous, and at times opaque, resisting any simplistic reading of the practices it depicts.
Ultimately, it is the overwhelming power of the imagery—above all the recurring, almost symbolic figure of the deer, around which the entire film seems to orbit, hence the Japanese title—together with Hara Marihiko’s evocative score, which moves effortlessly between electronic textures, chamber music, and solo piano, that elevates the documentary into something far more than an ethnographic record. It becomes an immersive meditation on ritual, memory, and humanity’s place within the non-human world.

The documentary has enjoyed a remarkable run in Japan’s mini-theater circuit, where strong word of mouth has repeatedly filled small cinemas and led to encore screenings nearly a year after its initial release, January 2025. As a companion project, the production company behind the film, Visual Folklore, together with director Hiro Riko, also released Suwa, a short film exploring the basin’s rituals and traditions from a woman’s perspective, with text by actor Konoe Hana. It is available to watch online.
One final word should be reserved for the documentary’s beautiful poster. Its artwork was created by the artist unit Ohkojima Maki, who undertook extensive research into the Suwa region and its cosmology before producing the image. Their work offers a fascinating visual interpretation of the beliefs and myths explored in the film, and some of the reflections developed in this review were inspired by their own writings and artistic research on the subject.

last image of the film

What Should We Have Done? (Fujino Tomoaki, 2024)

What Should We Have Done? was one of the most commercially successful independent documentaries released in Japanese theaters last year, earning more than 180 million yen after its initial release in December 2024, and remaining in cinemas for almost a year. The film directed by Fujino Tomoaki was also included in Kinema Junpo’s Best Bunka Eiga list for 2025, where it ranked second. Now What Should We Have Done? is again being screened in selected mini-theaters across the archipelago, giving me the chance to revisit it.

Produced by Fujino’s Zou-Shima, distributed in Japan by Tofoo Films, and completed with the support of Yamagata Dojo, a residency program for documentary filmmakers working on projects in progress, the film is built from video material—mostly shot digitally by the director himself over more than twenty years within his own family. These visual footage was recorded intermittently during his visits to the parents house, and traces the story of the director’s older sister, nicknamed Mako-chan or Mako, who suffered from mental illness, and of parents who, for almost her entire life, denied her condition and attempted to deal with it while almost never consulting a doctor.

Watching it for the second time gave me the chance to notice and appreciate things that, the first time around, were somewhat drowned out by the raw intensity of the experience. It was still a painful, heavy watch—perhaps even more piercing in some ways.
As Fujino has stated on various occasions, What Should We Have Done? is, from its very title, a document of a failure: the failure of an entire family—director included—toward his sister Mako, who began showing symptoms of schizophrenia in 1983, when she was 24. After allegedly consulting a specialist, the parents came to the conclusion that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her, and the family was discouraged from seeking psychiatric care for their daughter.

The film begins on a black screen, with the sister’s voice out of control, recorded by her brother on a Walkman in 1992. The video recordings started almost ten years later, in 2001, during the visits the director—now living in Kanagawa—made back home in Sapporo, Hokkaido. He began documenting his sister’s life and her relationship with their parents as a way of opposing and criticizing their treatment and decisions regarding her.

The use of low-resolution video feels absolutely right for conveying Mako’s miserable experience and, secondarily, that of the entire family. The rough texture of the images almost mirrors the emotional conditions in which everyone is trapped. On a filmmaking level, the documentary works largely thanks to the editing, which naturally shapes what the film ultimately becomes: a partial but real point of view on the tragic reality of the family. It must have been a near-Promethean task for Fujino and Asano Yumiko, who edited the film with the support of Hata Takeshi, to decide what to include, and especially when to cut away from some of the most distressing moments.

The structure, in this regard, is exemplary. The first part briefly sketches Mako’s life and that of her parents using photographs and home movies shot by the father in the early 1960s during their trip, for business, around the world. The couple was highly educated, both were researchers, and made the whole situation even more astonishing.
The film then moves forward chronologically, covering more than a decade beginning in 2001 and documenting the steady deterioration of Mako’s condition—and, alongside it, that of her parents. One day the director returns home and finds a padlock on the front door, installed by the parents so that Mako cannot escape. We learn, together with an appalled brother, that his sister has not left the house for almost a year.

The emotional peak of the documentary—and what must have been the lowest point in the relationship between daughter and parents, at least the one kept in the film—comes in a nighttime scene in which we realize that the mother, too, is beginning to show signs of dementia, while Mako’s piercing, bone-chilling screams fill the house.

The following scene—a black screen with written text—tells us that the parents finally gave up, and that Mako was hospitalized and given the appropriate medication.
The contrast between those unbearable screams and the later scene in which she calmly speaks, cooks, and washes the dishes is both astonishing and heartbreaking. It points toward what might have been—and that makes it all the more painful. 
The final part of the film is filled with tender, almost peaceful moments between the father, Mako, and her brother—and then with the inevitable ending, which I will not spoil.
An interesting layer is added when Fujino speaks with his father—now frail and in a wheelchair in a hospital—telling him about his wish to assemble all the footage shot over the past two decades and essentially asking, on camera, for his consent to do so.

Cinematographer Segawa Jun’ichi: Tracing Japanese Documentary Cinema through His Works

Of the many satellite events organized during last October’s Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival that I was unable to attend, one in particular caught my attention: “Cinematographer Segawa Jun’ichi: Tracing Japanese Documentary Cinema through His Works.”
This was an event organized to revisit the legacy of Segawa as a cameraman 30 years since his passing, and to kick off a retrospective that was held last December at the Athénée Français Cultural Center in Tokyo before traveling to Osaka’s Cinema Nouveau this February.

Although I had previously seen several documentaries in which Segawa worked as cinematographer, I only became fully aware of the real scope of his contribution to Japanese cinema about five years ago, while researching Haneda Sumiko’s Ode to Mt. Hayachine (1982). In Hayachine no fu (1984), her book on the film—part reflection on its genesis, part production diary—Haneda emphasizes several times the importance of having Segawa behind the camera.
In what is arguably her masterpiece, Haneda organized the shooting into two units. One group, led by Nishio Kiyoshi, focused primarily on filming the villages of Take and Ōtsugunai, while the other, lead by Segawa, concentrated on the alpine landscapes and the scenes shot near or at the summit of Mt. Hayachine, although for major sequences, such as the summer festival, the entire crew worked together. Haneda repeatedly stresses how decisive Segawa’s prior experience filming at high altitudes—and the fact that he was himself from Iwate Prefecture, where the mountain is located—proved to be for the success of the documentary.

Once I realized how central Segawa had been to the making of Ode to Mt. Hayachine, I began to look more closely at his career and discovered his involvement in several other landmark works in the history of Japanese documentary cinema such as Kamei Fumio’s Fighting Soldiers (1939) or Yanagisawa Hisao’s Children Before the Dawn (1968).
The retrospective moves precisely in this direction, offering a cartography of the evolution of Japanese nonfiction cinema, but also fiction films, through the major works in which Segawa played a key role.
24 works were screened in Tokyo and Osaka, here the list of the films in chronological order:

戦ふ兵隊 Fighting Soldiers (Kamei Fumio, 1939)
銀嶺の果て Snow Trail (Taniguchi Senkichi, 1947)
ジャコ萬と鉄 Jakoman and Tetsu (Taniguchi Senkichi, 1949)
新しい鉄 Atarashii tetsu (Ise Chōnosuke, 1956)
法隆寺 Hōryū-ji (Hani Susumu, 1958)
新しい製鉄所 Atarashī seitetsusho (Ise Chōnosuke, 1959)
留学生チュアスイリン Chua Swee Lin, Exchange Student (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1965)
夜明け前の子どもたち Children Before the Dawn (Yanagisawa Hisao, 1968)
仕事＝重サ×距離 三菱長崎造船所からのレポート Work = Weight x Distance Report from Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard (Matsukawa Yasuo, 1971)
風 The Wind (Segawa Jun’ichi, 1977)
遠い一本の道 The Far Road (Hidari Sachiko, 1977)
不安な質問 Anxious Questions (Matsukawa Yasuo, 1979)
海とお月さまたち Fishing Moon (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1980)
水俣の図・物語 The Minamata Mural (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1981)
早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine (Haneda Sumiko, 1982)
アントニー・ガウディー Antonio Gaudì (Teshigahara Hiroshi, 1984)
奈緒ちゃん Nao-chan (Ise Shin’ichi, 1995)
ルーペ カメラマン瀬川順一の眼 Magnifying Glass: The Eyes of Photographer Jun’ichi Segawa (Ise Shin’ichi, 1997)
回想・瀬川順一 土本典昭、2003年3月13日 (Tsutsui Takefumi, 2025)

Unfortunately, I was able to spend only one day in each city, but I managed nonetheless to see or revisit some milestones of Japanese documentary cinema.
In Tokyo, I attended a screening of Ode to Mt. Hayachine. Although I had watched it multiple times for my research, this was my first experience seeing it on 16mm and in a theatrical setting—and it was a revelation. The more lyrical sequences were, as expected, awe-inspiring, yet what stayed with me most after this viewing was Haneda and her team’s remarkable ability to weave an intricate and expansive audiovisual tapestry, in which people, history, folkloric practices, economic realities, non-human forces, and the mountain itself are all delicately embroidered into an ever-changing, open-ended whole.

My day in Osaka was more densely packed, with screenings of Jakoman and Tetsu—one of the few fiction films included in the retrospective, and perhaps the most handsome Mifune Toshirō has ever looked on screen—The Minamata Mural, one of the most powerful works Tsuchimoto Noriaki directed on the Minamata disaster, and Hani Susumu’s Hōryū-ji, which left such a deep impression on me that I decided to write about it separately. Like Hōryū-ji, Antonio Gaudí (1984)—the fourth film I saw in Osaka—engages with art, though of a different kind from the Buddhist sculpture housed at the temple in Nara. The way Segawa Jun’ichi’s camera and Teshigahara’s Hiroshi’s direction capture Gaudí’s sinuous buildings and imagination—enhanced by the music by Takemitsu Tōru—is hypnotic. For my part, the film could easily have lasted six hours.

I’m not sure whether the retrospective will travel to other Japanese cities, I suspect it will not, but I secretly hope it might eventually make its way to the Chūbu region region, where I live.
The event was planned and organized by Tsutsui Takefumi, Tanaka Shinpei, Nakamura Daigo, and Okada Hidenori, and was accompanied by an excellent catalogue (in Japanese), featuring essays by film historians, scholars, and directors — including a contribution by Hamaguchi Ryūsuke.

In Their Traces (Kobayashi Shigeru, 2025)

Kobayashi Shigeru is an important figure in Japanese documentary cinema, he was mentored by Yanagisawa Hisao—with whom he worked as an assistant director in his last two films, そっちゃないこっちゃ コミュニティ・ケアーへの道（1982) and 風とゆききし（1989)—but is probably best known for his long-standing collaboration with Satō Makoto. Kobayashi was behind the camera and an integral part of the creative process on both Living on the River Agano (Aga ni ikiru, 1992) and Memories of Agano (Aga no kioku, 2004), and in more recent years he has also been a key force in preserving and reviving the legacy of the latter film, as well as Satō’s work more broadly. Their collaboration extended also in the opposite direction with Satō editing Kobayashi’s And Life Goes On (Watashi no kisetsu, 2004). Unfortunately, of the films directed by Kobayashi I have so far seen only Dryads in a Snow Valley (Kaze no hamon, 2015), a beautiful documentary set in a mountain area between Niigata and Nagano Prefecture, which also functions as a kind of homage to Satō’s cinema.

Kobayashi was born in Niigata Prefecture and, from a young age, became involved in groups supporting the victims of Minamata disease. One of the close friends he made during this period began, some thirty years later, to experience violent flashbacks related to the sexual abuse she had suffered as a child. Around the same time, Kobayashi met a female photographer—also a survivor—who was using her photographs to support others who had endured similar experiences. These encounters prompted Kobayashi to confront his own past, suffering and growing up in an abusive family. It was at this point that he decided to make a documentary film, with the aim of helping audiences understand the reality of sexual abuse from the survivors’ point of view.

In Their Traces (Tamashii no kiseki) was presented last year in Yamagata and later on at the Tokyo International Film Festival. I missed the film during my stay in Yamagata, so I was very eager to catch up with it, and I’m glad I finally did.

The film opens with a phone call in which Kobayashi’s elderly friend tells him, matter-of-factly, that she tried to hang herself the previous night, unable to bear the recurring memories of the repeated abuse she suffered as an elementary school student.
The rawness of the subject matter, combined with the gentleness and respect with which the film is constructed, is one of the elements that makes In Their Traces such a remarkable and powerful viewing experience. A crucial decision in achieving this balance was Kobayashi’s choice to include himself as one of the film’s subjects. By foregrounding the violence he experienced—without lingering on it or allowing it to dominate the narrative—Kobayashi establishes a bond of trust with the viewer, while also underscoring the trust he built with the women who appear in the film.

It is this transparency and proximity to the other subjects that allows Kobayashi to build, on screen, resonances and parallels between the three women and their traumatic experiences. This transparency—and the trust it engenders—becomes even more powerful when the documentary, through the words of his friend (“you shouldn’t make the documentary” I’m paraphrasing), turns back on itself, questioning the very premise of the project.

The formal strategy of positioning the camera (operated by Oda Kaori), Kobayashi as director, and Kobayashi as participant as three active agents within the film’s reality enables to create a dialogic structure through which the women’s testimonies emerge in a touching and heart-wrenching manner, without ever feeling exploitative or overly dramatic. On the contrary, it is precisely the matter-of-fact quality of some of the exchanges we hear—regarding suicidal thoughts and experiences of sexual violence—that most deeply affects the viewer, making the film a profoundly empathetic experience.
This effect is further achieved by interspersing the highly affecting scenes of conversation with striking black-and-white photographs taken by one of the women, as well as with shots of the countryside and the sea. The ocean, with its vast expanse stretching toward the horizon, has a special meaning, especially for one of the women, who describes it as offering a sense of openness and thus hope.

A fascinating point raised by the film is that in many cases the abusive fathers or male figures were themselves survivors of war or people whose lives were severely affected by war. Kobayashi has commented when talking about the documentary that his own family was reimpatriated from the former Manchuria, bearing the weight of war with them. 

In conclusion, while the film loses some of its power, in my view, in the final thirty minutes—essentially from the point at which a workshop discussion about the making of the film is introduced—I found the first hour or so to be among the finest documentary filmmaking I have encountered in recent years.

Though I’m His Daughter それでも私は (Nagatsuka Yō, 2025)

On March 20, 1995—the day sarin nerve gas was released in several cars of the Tokyo subway—Japan experienced what is often regarded, together with the Great Hanshin earthquake two months earlier, a watershed moment in the recent history of the archipelago. Much has already been written and said about the attack carried out by members of the Aum Shinrikyō cult, which killed 13 people and injured hundreds, about the motivations behind it, and about the figure of Asahara Shōkō, the group’s leader, who was eventually executed in July 2018. Within documentary cinema, it is worth recalling at least Mori Tatsuya’s A (1998) and A2 (2001), two key works exploring the sect’s inner workings after Asahara’s arrest and its relationship with the mass media.

Far less attention, however, has been paid to Asahara’s family and to how the tragedy that unfolded three decades ago also affected his closest relatives. Most of them, understandably, changed their names and had their identities protected—especially the children, who were still minors at the time. The sole exception is Matsumoto Rika, Asahara’s third daughter (his real name being Matsumoto Chizuo), who was twelve years old at the time of the attack and had been designated as her father’s spiritual successor. A few years ago, she chose to reclaim her real name, come forward publicly, and stop hiding.

Though I’m His Daughter, a documentary directed by Nagatsuka Yō and released in Japan last year, investigates the reasons behind this decision and follows Rika’s life over a period of roughly six years, from 2018 to 2024. Although the film was screened in a limited number of cinemas across the archipelago last year, it appears to have maintained a relatively low profile, as addressing Aum Shinrikyō and its members remains a delicate and problematic subject—both for the Japanese state and for public opinion, which often, and rightly, calls for respect toward the victims of the attack.

Significantly, the film opens with a meeting between Rika and the brother of one of the victims of a manslaughter case that occurred in Aichi prefecture in 1979 (the so called Handa Hoken Kinsatsujin Jiken)—an encounter initiated by the latter—which immediately sets the film’s thematic tone. One of the documentary’s central concerns is precisely the way in which the relatives of victims and those of perpetrators come to share—to different degrees, naturally—a common fate: that of carrying an almost unbearable burden for the rest of their lives.

Yet the theme that perhaps emerges most forcefully from the film is the complex and deeply ambivalent relationship between father and daughter. While unequivocally condemning her father’s actions, Rika is shown to retain many positive personal memories of him. She cannot make sense of how the violence carried out by the group could coexist with one of its central tenets—the prohibition against killing, even insects. Moreover, following his arrest, she was never able to speak with him or ask about the true motivations behind his actions—both because officials did not permit such a meeting and because Asahara is said to have descended into a state of mental confusion after his arrest, to the point that he was reportedly no longer able to speak coherent Japanese. The film also shows briefly Tatsuya Mori, director of the aforementioned A and A2, attending a meeting held prior to Asahara’s execution in support of granting him proper medical treatment, so that it might be determined whether he was truly the one who ordered the killings—and why—two of the most significant unresolved questions hanging over both the film and Japanese society.

Rika learned of her father’s execution from a friend who was watching the news on television. At that moment, the director was understandably unable to film her; instead, Rika recorded herself, along with her sister Umi—whose identity is protected by the blurring of her face. The resulting footage shows her sister having an emotional breakdown while riding on a bus or in a car.

The emotional ambivalence towards his father is compounded by the discrimination Rika continues to face as she attempts to navigate Japanese society. Following the execution, Rika became the target of a wave of online harassment, with social media flooded by death threats and messages directing rage toward her. In this section of the film, screenshots of tweets and replies appear on screen, one of which starkly encapsulates the situation: “you have no right to be happy.” Finding employment, opening a bank account, or sustaining a romantic relationship all prove to be nearly insurmountable challenges. As a result, Rika experiences recurring bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts; here again, video footage—this time shot by her sister Umi—is used.
The death wish Rika harbored as a teenager after her father’s arrest—she remained in the group for four years following the attacks—painfully resurfaces. Her memories of that period are rendered on screen through harrowing sequences depicted in pencil animation.

As a way of confronting and reconnecting with their past, Umi and Rika travel to their father’s hometown, where his family once ran a tatami shop, reminiscing about a time when they still saw him as a caring figure. During the same trip, they also visit relatives who had disowned them and completely severed ties with the Matsumoto family.
It is at this point in the film that Nagatsuka decides to ask Rika what he considers the most important question: “Why did such a happy and fulfilled person come to do those horrible things?” The question remains unanswered, as no one is able to make sense of what happened in his life.

The final thirty minutes of the film focus on Rika’s efforts to break free from the depressive spiral into which she had fallen—exacerbated by the pandemic—and to forge an independent life, partly through her passion for mountaineering and bodybuilding, pursuits she approaches at a semi-professional level. 

The film opens with the director’s own narration, and his voice—along with the rationale behind the making of the documentary—serves as the thread connecting the work as a whole. Nagatsuka frequently appears on screen, both during and after the pandemic, including in the inevitable Zoom split-screen sequences, a choice I found visually weak. The film is at its strongest in its first hour or so, concluding with the onset of the pandemic and the visit to Asahara’s hometown, when the editing is tighter and the images are less overtly—and cheaply—emotional. The film’s concluding shot, a drone-filmed image from the top of a mountain, exemplifies the opposite tendency and ultimately feels inappropriate.

Though I’m His Daughter may not be without faults, but it possesses the considerable merit of posing difficult and compelling questions, even for viewers who may not share its underlying premises.

My Father, burned (Doi Haruka, 1994)

This short article could be considered an addendum to the piece I wrote several months ago about found footage films, compilation documentary and recycled cinema in Japan.

When Collaborative Cataloging Japan, the online platform dedicated to experimental and avant-garde cinema in the archipelago, made available Doi Haruka’s He Was Here, and You Are Here (なかのあなた いまのあなた 1985) a couple of years ago, it was for me a revelation.
The short film is an impressive and poetic debut centered on the idea of externalising one’s own memories, wishes, and fantasies as images projected onto walls, plates, or even the filmmaker’s own body. He Was Here, and You Are Here crystallizes the inventiveness of a particular approach to personal cinema in Japan during the 1990s, while at the same time standing as an exception—a singular and highly idiosyncratic experiment within the realm of Japanese “self-documentary” of that period.

For the whole month of December 2025, another work by Doi, My Father, burned (父が、燃えた 1994), is available to stream on the platform.

While He Was Here, and You Are Here marked Doi’s debut, My Father, burned represents her final foray into filmmaking, a career that lasted less than a decade. In the following years, Doi has been active in the field of Japanese music under the pseudonym HALUKA.

The short film originated in Doi’s discovery of old photographs of her father, along with home movies he had shot himself. As Collaborative Cataloging Japan notes, My Father, burned—described by the filmmaker as an “anti–home movie” —is a rare example of personal film that

illustrates Doi’s complicated relationship with her deceased father. A distanced fascination replaces the nostalgic or sentimental aspects one might expect in a film of this kind. Yet the sense of the power of the found image to shock and disarm remains — the familiar face that stares out from the rediscovered album; the laughter of a past self, seen through the eyes of one deceased. Through this cinematic reflection, Doi questions the image she had of her father prior to this posthumous mediation, even seeing similarities between his violent tendencies and her own rebellious nature.

The film is not only a reflection on Doi’s difficult relationship with her father after his passing, and on how memories shape who we are and who we become, but also a more subtle contemplation of the latent potential inherent in the reactivation of audiovisual footage—here, personal material.
Home movies shot by her father when she was little, together with old photographs of him, resurrect the “shadow” of his physical body, helping to construct a different image of the man and an alternative personal reality once inhabited by the filmmaker. Doi’s efforts here, albeit on a smaller and more personal scale, mirror those at work in the best examples of archival or found footage cinema, which “draw on archival material to breathe new life into it and construct new constellations of meaning—capable of questioning the present through a reconfiguration of the past.” (Cau, 2023)

My Father, burned represents thus a prime—if rare—example of the convergence of personal and archival cinema in Japan during the 1990s. This is particularly evident not only from what has been described above, but also from the film’s formal structure, in which the filmmaker’s thoughts are articulated as a form of commentary or narration accompanying the old photographs and home movies presented on screen.

It is also fascinating that the filmmaker briefly reflects, toward the end of the work, on the ethics of filming a dying person—when her father was ill in the hospital. Although this comment is not further developed, it remains a very relevant topic today and sheds light on Doi’s talent and her acute awareness of everything that surrounds the act of filming and filmmaking itself.

References:

Maurizio Cau, Rifigurare il passato. Il cinema d’archivio di Sergei Loznitsa in “Cinema e Storia 2023. Found footage: il cinema, i media, l’archivio” edited by Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau, Rubettino edizioni, 2023.

YIDFF 2025 – report 5: The Future of Dialogue: Yoshida Dormitory, Kyoto University

Previous reports:
YIDFF 2025: preview
report 1: SPI (Sayun Simung)
report 2: Awards
report 3: From the River to the Sea, and the Mountains: Filmmakers in Solidarity with Palestine – A Gathering
report 4: Appalachian Lenses, Hakishka

The Yoshida Dormitory at Kyoto University is the oldest student dormitory still in use in Japan. It consists of two residential buildings and a cafeteria, and residents can live there at a very affordable rate. Since the 1960s, the dormitory has been engaged in ongoing struggles with the university administration, fighting to preserve its autonomy and the political ideals it represents.

In December 2017, the university announced a new safety policy, citing concerns that the old structure could collapse in the event of an earthquake. The abrupt decision halted new resident admissions and ordered all current occupants of both the old and new buildings to vacate. The students and their supporters vehemently opposed the plan. It was around this time that director Fujikawa Keizō and his crew began filming in and around the dormitory, documenting the students’ daily lives and their fight to maintain their independence. 

This question of autonomy lies at the heart of the conflict between the dormitory residents and the university administration. As scholar and writer Andrew Williams acutely observed, “Dorms were once a vital source of income and membership for the on-campus self-governing associations that played a central role in the student movement of the 1960s by affiliating with certain New Left factions and aligning with political causes, to which they directed funds, resources, and members. Concomitant with the decline of those associations,” Williams continues, “due, inter alia, to administrative, legal, and sociocultural changes, is the atomization of the whole student movement in Japan from the 1970s onwards.” (Settlement reached in lawsuit over future of Kyoto University’s Yoshida Dormitory)

The Future of Dialogue: Yoshida Dormitory, Kyoto University is a documentary directed by Fujikawa, presented  in the Perspectives Japan program in Yamagata, that follows from the inside the life of some of the students and their struggle to keep the facility open, but at the same time depicts the delicate balance of self-governance that is at the core of the dormitory. 

The film starts very strong—both visually and structurally—but loses part of its momentum in the second half. At first, I thought this was because, by shifting its focus from a depiction of the dormitory’s activities and struggles—both past and present, conveyed through a well-integrated use of archival photos and written explanations—the film turns its gaze inward. There are many interviews and scenes centered on internal relationships, while I would have preferred more attention to the dormitory’s broader history.

However, as the documentary progressed, I found my opinion changing drastically. The issue isn’t the number of voices—in fact, the internal discussions are among the film’s most captivating elements. Through these conversations, we gain insight into how the dormitory functions as a self-governing community, providing students with affordable housing and fostering a sense of collective life. The rhythm and editing of the first twenty to thirty minutes, along with the rich color palette and tonal nuances, make the opening section a striking portrayal of a self-organized collective in struggle.

The main issue, I think, is temporal rather than thematic—and partly visual as well, somehow, the visual flair that animated the opening scenes fades away as the film progresses. The documentary should have concluded before the pandemic—since the period of filming during Covid is understandably absent. Instead, it attempts to incorporate every major update from the past two years, including one that occurred just a month or so before the Yamagata screening (the settlement reached on August 25). This leads to a series of codas that stretch the narrative and dilute the focus of the film. As a result, the work feels unfinished, or, rather, like a work in progress still awaiting completion.

As said, the documentary would have been stronger had it ended before the pandemic, or, conversely, if it had extended its scope to include the aftermath and reactions following the August 2025 settlement. However, during the post-screening talk—before a packed audience, not a single seat was empty—Fujikawa mentioned that he considers the project finished and will not continue filming. Another factor that may have affected the final result is the requirement to obtain permission from all dormitory participants before using the footage shot inside, which must have limited what could ultimately be included.

Another compelling point, raised by scholar Aaron Gerow, concerns the students’ anxiety over how television cameras—after a TV station requested permission to film their meetings—might have portrayed their dormitory council sessions, and how the presence of those cameras restricts free expression. “Yet we spectators then have to ask what this means for Fujikawa’s camera, which also attends those meetings,” Gerow observes. “Is cinema different? Is Fujikawa different? Largely shot in a vérité style, the film does not engage in explicit self-reflection on this issue.” (SPUTNIK—YIDFF Reader 2025)

Beyond the explosive opening section mentioned earlier, several evocative scenes extend beyond the direct confrontation between the students and the university administration—and I found these particularly compelling.
One such moment depicts a typhoon striking Kyoto and partially damaging the dormitory; another, especially memorable, shows the students deciding to clean up a neglected space—if I’m not mistaken, the old cafeteria. The scene immediately calls to mind From Up on Poppy Hill by Miyazaki Gorō, in which students band together to restore the Quartier Latin building. The same sense of camaraderie and shared purpose that animates Miyazaki’s film (scripted by his father Hayao) comes through vividly here.

While far from perfect, The Future of Dialogue: Yoshida Dormitory, Kyoto University —this is by the way the direct translation of the Japanese 対話のゆくえ　京都大学吉田寮, better in my opinion that the English title used at the festival, The Yoshida-ryo Dormitory—remains a fascinating work worth engaging with, and marked by several powerful and resonant moments.
One final note: director Fujikawa mentioned that the version screened at the festival was the “Yamagata cut,” suggesting that future screenings in other venues across Japan may feature a different version of the film.

Places of film culture in Japan /2: Royal Theater in Gifu 岐阜ロイヤル劇場

This is the second article in a series about “The Places of Film Culture in Japan” :  cinema archives (big or small, independent or state-funded), film museums, and community cinema centers that foster a love for cinema and emphasize the importance of preserving and studying the history of audiovisual production.

You can read the first, Hashima Eiga Shiryō-kan 羽島市映画資料館, here.

This article is a translation of my piece originally written for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. Since it was written for a general audience, the article retains its broad approach.

Since the dawn of cinema, movie theaters have been an integral part of the evolution of urban areas. The Japanese archipelago is no exception: more than one phase of its urbanization coincided with the expansion of movie theaters, places that built the social fabric of an area, whether urban or rural.

During the golden age of Japanese cinema in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were over 7,000 movie theaters in Japan. This number declined sharply when television became a central part of every household. 1964 was a crucial period in this sense; the Tokyo Olympics sparked a significant increase in television purchases that year. Additionally, some of the country’s major film studios went bankrupt in the early 1970s, and in the 1980s, a subsequent metamorphosis of cinematic spaces occurred. The advent of mini-theaters, small cinemas that screened (and still screen) independent or arthouse films from around the world.

The introduction of videocassettes and DVDs, as well as the proliferation of multiplexes in large shopping malls over the last twenty-five to thirty years, have contributed to epochal changes in how people experience cinema and inhabit Japan’s urban fabric. The relocation of cinemas, restaurants, entertainment venues, bars, and shops from historic city centers—which are rare in Japanese cities—to shopping complexes outside the city limits has furthered the emptying of entire urban areas.

This is especially true for small provincial towns, whose shōtengai have turned into ghost towns or hallucinations of a bygone era. Shōtengai refers to pedestrian streets, often covered arcades—as those loved and explored by Walter Benjamin in Paris—where various commercial establishments, small shops, restaurants, bars, cinemas, and small theaters are, or rather were, grouped. Though small commercial streets have existed since time immemorial, especially in front of temples and shrines, these urban areas evolved into covered arcades during the Showa period (1926–1989), especially near train stations.

The shift towards online shopping and the consumption of audiovisual products at home has led to the further decline of the shōtengai, a waning that had already started in the 1980s.
In recent years, these places have become known colloquially as shattagai, a portmanteau word that refers to the desolation of these places and a blending of the terms shattaa (shutter) and gai (town or urban area). In these arcades, most shops are now closed, or, if they are still open, they are run by longtime owners who aren’t ready to give up.
In large cities, some of these shotengai remain active, or at least afloat, thanks to the growing urban population and tourists seeking places with a bygone Showa-period feel. Others are undergoing gentrification and being demolished to make way for tall residential buildings.

The situation in small provincial towns is more complicated. Many of these towns are depopulating, a problem linked to the influx of younger generations from the countryside to the cities and the aging of the Japanese population more broadly.

Gifu is a city located at the geographic center of Japan’s main island, Honshū, and is halfway between a provincial and a metropolitan area. Although large, Gifu is not a metropolitan city in itself. It is too close to Nagoya, Japan’s third-largest city, and is slowly becoming its suburban area.

One of the town’s covered arcades is home to Japan’s only movie theater that exclusively shows movies on film. The Gifu Royal Gekijō (Gifu Royal Theater) is a repertory theater that shows one movie per week, with screenings three or four times each day, in the morning and afternoon. The theater is located in an area of the arcade known as Gekijō Dōri, or Theater Street, which, as the name suggests, once housed numerous theaters and cinemas.

Only vestiges remain of its glorious past. In addition to the Royal Gekijō, there is a small theater that shows contemporary films, Cinex, owned by the same company that manages the repertory cinema, and a theater for live performances.

Royal Gekijō evolved from numerous theaters and cinemas that opened and closed over the decades. The first venue was first opened in 1926 and later on, in 1955, became a large theater managed by the Tōei studio. Then, it changed hands over the following decades until its closure in the early 2000s. In 2009, the theater began hosting occasional events dedicated to Showa-era cinema. Given their relative success, these events later became a regular feature.

The entrance of the cinema, on the first floor, is decorated with large figures of stars from the golden age of Japanese cinema. These figures include Takakura Ken, Kiyoshi Atsumi, Asaoka Ruriko, Mifune Toshirō, and Hara Setsuko. The decorations serve as a sort of portal and conceptual introduction to the venue. This time machine effect, as it were, continues with the songs played in the theater before each screening. Mainly songs that were popular in Japan during the 1950s and 1960s.

The film program is varied, but only Japanese feature films are shown nowadays—when the Showa program was launched, it also screened movies from the U.S. or Europe.  These include melodramas produced by Shōchiku, jidaigeki by Tōei and Tōhō, comedies and satires that are still little known outside the archipelago, and mini-retrospectives dedicated to actors, directors, and sometimes even the locations where the films were shot – with a particular attention to films shot in Gifu prefecture. 

Every summer, to commemorate the end of the Pacific War and the tragedy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the theater showcases films with strong anti war content or powerful pacifist messages. This year, the program is particularly significant, as it marks the 80th anniversary of the war’s end. In July and August, films such as Kinoshita Keisuke’s Army (1944) and Twenty-Four Eyes, as well as the trilogy Men and War—directed by Yamamoto Satsuo for Nikkatsu between 1970 and 1973—are being screened.

In my ten years of going to the theater, I have been struck and impressed more than once by the sheer power of the viewing experience itself, regardless of the movie’s quality. Needless to say, seeing a movie—especially a 35mm film in TōhōScope or one of the other large-format experiments the studios tried in the 1950s and 1960s—is a different experience than watching a DCP screening. This is true even though many of the films are not in optimal condition.

As for the type of audience that usually attends the screenings at the Royal Gekijō, most viewers are over seventy. Through the movies, they can relive their youth or perhaps seek a couple of hours of relief from the heat in summer and the cold in winter. In this sense, the experience is almost like visiting a museum, or perhaps more akin to going to a Shōwa-kan or a Taishō-kan, places that recreate or preserve the atmosphere of bygone eras and evoke a strong sense of nostalgia.

As we have seen, the history and future of cinematic exhibition is linked to and depends on the evolution of urban spaces and, therefore, on how its inhabitants experience the city. It will be interesting to see if and how cinema—here considered as a collective experience—will endure or transform further, or if it will remain a shared dream that only a few will remember.

Places of film culture in Japan: 1/ Hashima Eiga Shiryō-kan 羽島市映画資料館

Upon discovering the Japan Community Cinema Center and its annual reports on film culture and its diffusion throughout the country, I was inspired to republish this old post. I hope this is the start of a series of articles about “The Places of Film Culture in Japan,” exploring the various cinema archives (big or small, independent or state-funded), film museums, and community cinema centers that foster a love for cinema and emphasize the importance of preserving and studying the history of audiovisual production.

Originally posted in 2018 and re-edited in September 2023 (further re-editing: 2025, June).

There’s a place I’ve wanted to visit since moving to Gifu Prefecture that I discovered by chance while surfing the Internet. It’s a small, movie-related museum located in Hashima City: the Hashima Eiga Shiryō-kan 羽島市映画資料館

Movie museums, archives, and places devoted to preserving and documenting the history of cinema and movies (big spectacles, home movies, and video art alike) are becoming an increasingly interesting field for me to explore. Therefore, even though it is, strictly speaking, not about documentaries, but rather about documenting films and their history, I have decided to start a series of posts about Japan’s few but active film museums and film centers (2025 correction: I was wrong, there are in Japan more facilities dedicated to cinema than I thought. Also I have not continued the series…shame on me).

The most famous are the National Film Archive in Tokyo and the Kobe Planet Film Archive in Hyogo. The latter is a place that has been featured many times on this blog. It is a mini-theater and archive—perhaps an exemple of counter archival practices in the archipelago?—that I have visited many times, and through which I have discovered many important movies. Another museum I visited a couple of years ago is the Toy Film Museum in Kyoto. It was recently in the international news because of the discovery of a film by Ozu Yasujirō that was once believed to be lost, Tokkan Kozo.

The Hashima Eiga Shiryō-kan, located on the outskirts of the “empire” in an old area of the city of Hashima, is housed in a small, two-story building.

Established in 1996, the museum shares the building with the Folk History Museum. However, its appearance (at least from the inside) is more reminiscent of a cinema museum than an ethnographic museum. For instance, at the ground floor entrance, visitors are welcomed by dozens of film posters from different eras.

The main exhibition space is located on the second floor, where one room is filled with old movie cameras, some of which are bulky machines dating back to the 1940s. There are also flatbed editors, speakers, and posters—a real feast for the eyes. As you can see in the photo below, there are even some seats from an old theater. The seats probably belonged to the Takehana Asahi Cinema, a beloved theater that was an important part of the local community. The theater was active between 1934 and 1971, and the museum stands in the same spot as the Takehana Asahi Cinema.

Even after its closure, the old building remained intact and untouched until the end of the 1980s. Around that time, the people of Hashima started pressuring the city to bring a cinema back to their neighborhood. The interest was probably sparked by the advent of mini-theaters during the decade and fueled by the money flowing through the bubble period. Around 1992, an inspection revealed that the building was dilapidated and in danger of collapsing. However, hundreds of movie posters were discovered inside its vaults. This led to the decision to embark on a new project: the establishment of a movie museum. The new building was modeled after the old theater on its south facade and after Takegahana Castle on its west facade.

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(the old Takehana Asahi Cinema and the South facade of the museum, source )

The other room is set up like a screening room, with rows of chairs in the center and a small screen at the far end. Film posters and other memorabilia adorn the walls, mainly from the golden age of Japanese cinema and jidai-geki movies.

For me, the highlights were two very old and beautiful long posters from the 1930s, but unfortunately, I could not take photos of them. According to its website, the museum stores over 50,000 items, including posters and other memorabilia. Only a small portion of these items were on display the day I visited.

On the second Saturday of every month, the main room turns into a screening room where people gather to watch and discuss movies chosen by the museum staff. Films screened this year included I Want to Be a Shellfish (1959), Nobuko Rides on a Cloud (1955), and The Bullet Train (1975).

The museum sets a good example of what local movie theaters outside big cities could become: a place to preserve and celebrate cinema and film culture. They could also function as small repertory theaters or community cinemas.

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Interview with Soejima Shinobu

Something not related to the world of documentary today: I translated my June 2024 interview with the talented stop-motion artist Soejima Shinobu. I met her at an exhibition in Kanazawa, where her latest short, 私の横たわる内臓 My Organs Lying on the Ground, was screened for a week or so. 
The piece was originally published in Italian in Alias on August 17, 2024.

On a different note, she is pitching her new project, 彼女の話をしよう Talking About Her (currently in production), at the ongoing Annecy International Animation Film Festival, on June 10.

Soejima Shinobu is a Japanese artist who has been active in the world of stop motion animation for the last decade. She creates fascinating short films that blend her interest in Asian and Japanese folklore and religious practices with her passion for sculpture. In these experimental works, which have been presented at various international events, Soejima prioritizes the materiality of the puppets and their environments over the narrative elements.

In 2018, Soejima created The Spirits of Cairn, a story in which a guardian must contend with heads of birds appearing and disappearing in a cemetery. The following year, in House Rattler, she brought the spirits of an old house to life as imagined in Japanese folklore. Her most successful and accomplished work to date is perhaps Blink in the Desert (2021), a short film in which a boy/monk is overcome with guilt after killing a moth.

Her latest work, My Organs Lying on the Ground, was presented last June [2024] in Kanazawa, in a small exhibition that displayed also some of her sculptures. It is a short film that reinterprets a Japanese spiritual practice known as tainai kuguri, a purifying journey through the bowels of the earth. In this piece, which makes extensive use of organic materials such as meat, insects and cereals, Soejima creates a space where the boundaries between earthly life and the afterlife, between organism and inorganic matter, and between inside and outside dissolve
I had the opportunity to speak with the artist at the exhibition.

私の横たわる内臓 My Organs Lying on the Ground

How did you get into stop motion animation?

I have always been interested in sculpture ever since I was a child. I continued making sculptures until the end of my bachelor’s program when my professor realized I had a talent to creating stories, then he suggested I combine the two.

Very soon, I quickly realized that I loved stop motion animation. With sculpture, I usually had to keep all my work in my studio, which took up a lot of space. With film, however, I was able to edit and distort my work and film the whole process, which I really enjoy. I am also interested in the idea that, by filming materials decompose and transform into different forms, I can preserve the essence of the sculpture.

Could you talk about your creative process? On your website, you have collected images from your research journeys. Do you start from places, or do you start from a story you want to tell? Or, do the images guide you?

I usually think about the setting first. The environment in which the events take place is crucial to me. For example, in my first film, The Spirits of Cairn, I wanted to depict the story of someone who died very young and I tried to think of the best way to represent a place between life and death. I started with an image of dozens of bird heads in a place with many cavities that must be kept empty by a guardian of some kind.

For my second film, House Rattler, which is set in my grandmother’s old house, I also started with the setting. For my latest work, My Organs Lying on the Ground, I wanted the characters to be even more connected to the environment to reflect ideas from ecology and animism. To bring this concept to life, I decided to use organic materials because, when we consume something, it goes back to the earth. Plants grow back, and we eat again. It’s a repeating cycle.

Since the puppets are literally empty bodies that resemble human beings but have no soul, I thought these organic materials could connect them to their surroundings. This concept is also similar to a Buddhist view of reality: a fish does not exist in and of itself; we call something a fish because it is in the water.

Sticking with the religious theme, your latest work, My Organs Lying on the Ground, but also The Spirits of Cairn is based on the ritual and spiritual practice known as “tainai kuguri” (passing through the womb). What role do religious practices play in your work?

I come from a religious family and so from the time I was born I have something I can believe in, so I think it’s something very real to me, although I’m not very sure I’m as religious as my parents. I was also influenced by my time in Malaysia, where I lived from the time I was twelve years old until I was twenty, I remember for example that there were tropical fruits rotting on the ground and when no one touched them, they would dissolve into. But the Malaysians don’t think this is wasteful because they believe in this cycle, sometimes you eat the fruits, sometimes you let them rot on the ground and from there plants and new fruits grow back. I remember this image very clearly, partly because it goes against what the Japanese usually think, if you see something rotting on the ground, you immediately think of waste and a sense of dirtiness. Hindu culture also influenced me a lot, in my years in Malaysia of course, but also later when I went to Nepal to do research.

The puppets’ eyes in many of your works, especially in Blink in the Desert, have an uncommon expressiveness. Could you talk about how you achieve this effect?

I usually use glass eyes like the ones used for stuffed animals. When light hits them, they seem to move and take on an almost watery appearance. This technique comes from Buddhist and Japanese sculptures, as well as Asian sculptures in general. Special crystals were used for the eyes when making these statues. Long ago, Buddhist temples had no artificial lights, so candles were used. When the flickering candlelight hit the statues’ eyes, they looked very watery and almost alive.

In My Organs Lying on the Ground, the expressions and eyes of your puppets seem kinder to me, and the colors seem warmer and less cold than in your previous short film. Is this just my impression?

In my penultimate work, Blink in the Desert, I tried to portray the main character’s inner confusion and negative feelings, so the film ended up being rather emotionally intense. For this latest work, however, I tried something different, something more related to sculpture that could only be realized through stop motion. I thought a lot about how to make the puppets because combining them with organic material might shock viewers. In the past, dolls were used in Japan to expel sins or evil spirits from people, and then they were thrown into rivers. Perhaps all of this influenced the look of the puppets I used in my short film, as well as my decision to use positive, almost party-like music to accompany it.

It seems to me that your work tends to emphasize the symbolic and allegorical over the purely narrative. There is a story, but it is not linear.

When I create my work, I feel as if I am documenting sculptures and their changes over time. In this sense, I have been influenced by postminimalism, especially Richard Serra’s approach. Stop motion animation and the puppets I use are very real to me. Through them, I can show reality in a tactile way, so to speak, which is what interests me. This approach was also influenced by the pandemic, especially in my last short film. While working on Blink in the Desert, I was confined to my small room for nearly a year. I felt disconnected from the world, communicating solely through screens, and it seemed as if my body and feelings were detached. I needed physical interaction with the environment and to return to a tactile and material level.