Oda Kaori Goes ‘Underground’ and Semi-Fictional to Complete 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. It also marks a new direction for the director, whose previous trilogy entries were documentaries.

“Underground” is not the first time Oda has mixed fictional and documentary elements, however: Both could also be found in “Thus a Noise Speaks,” a prize-winning 2012 film she made about her family while a college student in the U.S.

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.

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In an interview, Oda says that she did not initially intend “Underground” as a capstone to a trilogy. “I didn’t plan it that way at all,” she explains. Rather, she had a unifying vision: “I wanted to shoot various underground spaces in Japan and how they impacted the people living in and around them,” she says.

She also wanted the challenge that fiction provided: “From the beginning, I wanted to add a fictional layer. There were many things that I could depict candidly and unreservedly this way,” she says.

“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. “I wanted to depict a longer period of time and various spaces,” Oda commented.

Some of her footage became standalone films, such the Sapporo section in a 2022 short also titled “Underground,” and the Okinawa section that, in a different edit, became the 2023 short “Gama.” “I created a narrative by editing, though it’s not linear,” Oda explains. “I was careful. I wanted to make sure that no matter how this would be used later, it would stand on its own as a single shot, and that it could be seen on its own.”

After ten years with one theme, however, Oda is ready for a change. “I don’t have a big feature film in mind,” she says. “Right now, I’m making short films with my mother.”