In Focus: Kaori Oda​

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Japanese experimental filmmaker Kaori Oda uses her camera as a navigational tool, feeling her way through unfamiliar worlds, particularly subterranean terrains, in her “underground” experimental non-fiction features. These films are dazzling visual and sensory experiences that at first seem preoccupied with remote, unlivable landscapes. Yet within even the most extreme locales, Oda reveals a strikingly syncretic world – one in which nonhuman landscapes converse with human memories, desires, and cosmologies.

Born in Osaka, Oda first left Japan to study in the United States, before relocating to Bosnia, where she spent three formative years at Béla Tarr’s film.factory. Her thesis feature Aragane (2015), shot in a Bosnian coal mine, marked the beginning of her “underground” trilogy. This was followed by Cenote (2019), which journeys into the sinkholes of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, and most recently Underground (2024), the closing chapter of the triptych, which descends into the caves of Okinawa.

 

Movement and nomadism in Oda’s work resist the broad strokes of ethnographic filmmaking and instead linger on specific landscapes, images, and their attendant memories and myths. Even in her more personal short films made with her family in Osaka – Thus a Noise Speaks (2010), Karaoke Cafe BOSA (2022), and Recording with Mother “Working Hands” (2025) – Oda treats home as a contested threshold and a site for deeper exploration. These films probe questions of belonging, inheritance, and queer identity, as Oda explores how the familial terrain can open onto uncharted territory.

Over the past decade, Oda has gained international recognition on the festival circuit – winning various awards – and attracting admirers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who described her work as one that “literally reinvents my idea of what cinema is and can be […] because it has an exquisite formal and even abstract beauty.” What distinguishes Oda’s work is her capacity to fuse the elemental with the human, sculpting light in darkness, orchestrating a delicate interplay between what can and cannot be seen and what can and cannot be articulated. 

With thanks to Daiwa Foundation for making this retrospective possible.