Get the latest gossip
Oda Kaori Goes ‘Underground’ and Semi-Fictional to Complete Subterranean Trilogy
Oda Kaori’s docudrama 'Underground' ventures from a subway in Sapporo to caves in Okinawa and completes the Japanese director's subterranean trilogy.
The last element of a trilogy exploring subterranean spaces that began with the 2015 “Aragane” and continued with the 2019 “Cenote,” Oda Kaori ’s docudrama “Underground” ventures from a subway in Sapporo to caves (locally called “gama”) in Okinawa. Screening in the Tokyo International Film Festival ’s Nippon Cinema Now section, “Underground” stars Yoshigai Nao as a mysterious woman who serves as a shadowy, all-but-silent guide to Oda’s poetic explorations in the borderlands between darkness and light, life and death, past and present, while establishing her own, independent presence. “Underground” is the culmination of a three-year process that took Oda from Japan’s northmost main island of Hokkaido, where she filmed in the Sapporo subway, to Okinawa, the country’s southern-most prefecture, where she recorded a local historian explaining how Okinawans hidden in caves during the 1945 invasion by U.S. forces survived – and in some cases died by group suicide.
Or read this on Variety