Oda Kaori’s “Underground”: Sound and Images Open New Doors to Perception

Cinema May 20, 2025

Oda Kaori is a young film director with a handful of works to her name, but she has received the support of major names like the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr and the Japanese musical giant Sakamoto Ryūichi. Her latest work, Underground, sees her exploring subterranean spaces for a third consecutive outing.

Oda Kaori

Filmmaker. Born in 1987 in Osaka Prefecture. Noizu ga iu ni wa (Thus a Noise Speaks), her graduation project at the film program at Virginia’s Hollins University, garnered her a prize at the 2011 Nara International Film Festival. Two years later she was invited by the Hungarian director Béla Tarr to take part in the Film.Factory program he organized, becoming part of the first class to earn graduate degrees from the program in 2016, Her 2015 Aragane won a special prize in the New Asia Currents division of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival that year. In 2020, the year she released Cenote, she won the inaugural Ōshima Nagisa Prize; in the following year she took the Minister of Education’s Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists. Her latest full-length feature, the 2024 Underground, premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival in October that year and appeared in theaters across Japan the following spring.

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An Indecisive Auteur

Oda Kaori’s films are often thought of as documentaries, but their format diverges from the documentary style viewers are accustomed to.

Oda’s filming method and approach to her subjects incorporate documentary elements, but her films are closer to art films or experimental films in the emphasis they place on observing, pondering, and expressing. Few Japanese film directors have made a name for themselves with this method.

Two of her previous films, Aragane (2015) and Cenote (2019), have been shown at international film festivals and won a number of prizes. But the most notable aspect of Oda’s career is winning the inaugural Ōshima Nagisa Prize, named for the celebrated director, in 2020. Even though she did not meet the criteria for selection—three theatrical releases and having directed a film in the previous year—she was strongly recommended for the prize by the judging panel chair, the musician Sakamoto Ryūichi.

Despite Sakamoto’s unwavering conviction that Oda had talent, she was surprisingly indecisive about a filmmaking career. Join us as we describe her path from the start of her work through Aragane, Cenote, and her latest film, Underground.

“What Should I Shoot?”

In high school, Oda was mad about basketball; she even considered joining a corporate team after graduation until an injury put paid to those plans. Traveling to the United States, she attended Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied filmmaking, although that was not a subject she chose out of any strong conviction.

Undecided about a future career path, she took her academic advisor’s advice to choose a graduation project topic that aroused the most conflict in her. Ultimately, she settled on making a film about coming out to her family as a member of a sexual minority.

This 38-minute-long work, Noizu ga iu ni wa (Thus a Noise Speaks), was her debut as a director. In it, she did not record what actually took place; instead, she had her family reenact scenes in front of the camera, an approach tackling the boundary between documentary and fiction.

”It all started with that film,” says Oda. “Coming out was the biggest thing on my mind at the time, but once the film was done, I had no idea what subject I would take up next.”

Meeting a Master

The next stop on Oda’s filmmaking journey was Bosnia-Herzegovina. Béla Tarr, a Hungarian film producer and director whose last film before retiring was The Turin Horse (released in Japan with the English title Nietzsche’s Horse), was setting up the Film.Factory film school at the University of Sarajevo and had begun recruiting students from around the world in 2012.

Oda got wind of this through a contact at the Nara International Film Festival, an opportunity that came her way after winning a student division prize at this festival for Thus a Noise Speaks. Her work met Tarr’s approval and she joined his first cohort of students. Although she had not been conscious of it at the time, her debut work opened many doors to her later, setting her course toward a filmmaking career.

Oda reflects on that period, saying, “At the time, I didn’t feel as though I had anything to give, so I resolved to go to an unfamiliar place, meet new people, and explore the world through the lens of my camera. That became the aim of my filmmaking.”

Oda lived in Sarajevo from 2013 to 2016, where she developed a new approach to filmmaking as a composition of images and sounds. She followed a trial-and-error process, assembling fragmentary images into what became the full-length feature Aragane, her graduation work.

Aragane. (© Oda Kaori)

She had intended Aragane to be fiction based on Franz Kafka’s novella The Bucket Rider. Coal features in the story, so she decided to visit an actual coal mine nearby for background. She chose Breza, a village 30 kilometers northwest of Sarajevo, where coal mining has been going on for over 100 years, descending 300 meters into the mine to shoot there.

The film was made in documentary style, but without narration, on-screen captions, or interviews. By the dim light of the headlamp attached to her helmet, Oda recorded the miners working in the almost impenetrable gloom and captured the roar of the mine’s heavy equipment. The unparalleled experience she captured in images and sound resonated worldwide.

From the Balkans to Mexico

Two years later, Oda set out for Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, where she planned to shoot footage in the area’s many subterranean springs. In addition to conducting location research, she studied documents relating to Mayan myths, and talked with local inhabitants. She also acquired a scuba diving license in order to film underwater.

These endeavors culminated in Cenote and helped to make her name. Oda describes her basic approach to the filmmaking process, from research to shooting and editing, in the following words.

Cenote. (© Oda Kaori)

”Similarly to Aragane, the story begins through human connection. That’s not something you can will into being. So, if you’re blessed with establishing a connection, you need to meet people and research their environment. That gives me ideas about how much I can actually shoot.”

Oda regrets having caused pain to her family, particularly her mother, with the shooting of Thus a Noise Speaks. She is very conscious of the “violence” the camera can inflict and is strongly attuned to her responsibilities and ethical behavior toward her subjects.

”The people who appear in front my camera and speak share only a limited commonality with us, and from our perspective, we can only express ourselves within that commonality. I really believe that we shouldn’t digest a story as if we were genuinely involved, when we haven’t experienced or understood what our subjects have experienced themselves.”

Underground Again

After the release of Cenote, Oda’s work became broadly recognized when she was awarded the Minister of Education’s Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists in 2021. This led to her subsequently receiving commissions for public art projects.

These included film projects commissioned by Sapporo, Hokkaidō, and the Osaka Prefecture municipality of Toyonaka. In her agreements with those cities, she secured the right to use footage shot during those assignments as material for a feature film, which helped finance her newest work.

Oda’s Underground gradually became a more ambitious project, involving the largest staff she had ever worked with. Shot on 16-millimeter film, her first attempt at using this medium, she left filming up to a shooting director, a major departure from her filmmaking method. She commissioned a sound artist to create music for the film, attempting to develop a new perspective balancing sound and image equally.

Oda’s attempts to probe the depths of memory through the underground world are linked at a fundamental level with her previous works Aragane and Cenote. To this she added the new element of greenery as she explored the underground depths of Sapporo’s subway system, the gama of Okinawa, and other subterranean voids here and there in Japan. The gama were where many Okinawan civilians fled in the final months of World War II and where they perished. The connection that led her to the gama is that the city of Toyonaka, which had previously commissioned a project with her, is a sister city of Okinawa.

Matsunaga Mitsuo, a storyteller of Okinawa’s war experience, guided Oda to the gama. Since 1988, he has been a peace education guide and has worked to recover human remains on the island. (© 2024 Trixta)

Although Underground evokes subterranean images, it also features scenes above ground. In contrast to extreme conditions—the suffocating atmosphere of a coal mine or the underwater world—Oda seems to have surfaced into the world of everyday life and is breathing more freely.

In Aragane and Cenote, Oda wanted to discover what could be filmed in difficult environments but denies, smilingly, that she wanted to become an “auteur of the extreme.” “I just wanted to see what was underground; the act of physically descending underground with a camera was no doubt connected with something buried in my subconscious. I was creating a world based on physical sensations. But in my latest work, I began feeling that it wasn’t necessary to actually go underground.”

Oda only began thinking of making Underground the third work of a three-part series after Aragane and Cenote, once the work was finally completed. She says that even while shooting and editing Underground, she made no connection between it and the two previous works.

She explains, though, that “one of my major themes is collective memory; that is a common thread running through the three works. They share many things—descending underground, probing memory, and shooting strata and so on—but it was only after a trial viewing of Underground in complete form and having a bit of downtime that I realized that. The films form a three-part series, and I feel I’m now ‘done’ with the ‘underground’ theme.”

Oda does not believe that completing a film means her work on it is finished. She feels that engaging in conversation with her films’ viewers is an important stage in the expressive undertaking. Taking those exchanges as her next departure point, Oda, straining to hear voices previously unheard or see scenes not clearly apprehended before, will undoubtedly use those experiences to generate new ideas.

Trailer (Japanese)

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