While we meet many people and objects of art as we wander through the societal field, only a few of these meetings end up being encounters – moments that sort subjective effects. With this series, we do not only aim to document our encounter with the creative subject, but also seek to create the possibility for the reader to have an encounter with their oeuvre.
For our first encounter, we invited Masakazu Kaneko, the director of The Albino’s Trees (2016), Ring Wandering (2022), River Returns (2024). We explore his coming-into-being as director and delve into the thematical fabric of his oeuvre to make his creative philosophy explicit.
We want to extend our thanks to Eric McEver for perfectly guiding this interview, for making this encounter possible, with his incredible interpretation skills.
Psychocinema: Many directors have an encounter with film that pushes them to the art of filmmaking, for Ryusuke Hamaguchi, for instance, it was the cinema of Cassavetes. Which moment made you decide to pursue a career in film?
“Originally, when I was a child, I loved drawing. Rather than wanting to become a film director from a young age, I wanted to do work related to painters, manga artists, or designers. But around the end of my teens, I also became interested in films and started watching them. Among those films, in terms of cinema that felt painterly, I saw Tarkovsky — the Russian director Tarkovsky — and I was deeply shocked by the realization that film could express things in the way paintings do. I think that was a major influence on me.”
“The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa originally aspired to become a painter as well. Especially after Kurosawa started making colour films, his movies became extremely painterly. I felt a tremendous sense of possibility and dream in realizing that you could make films the way one paints pictures.”
Psychocinema: You seek to paint with nature.
“Yes, definitely. The reason I started filming nature goes back to when I was a university student. While attending university — which was not a film school or art school, but just a regular university — I still wanted to make films. So, I attended a kind of filmmaking workshop that met only on Saturdays for a year. In that workshop we were given various assignments, and one summer assignment was: ‘Go and film the thing you most want to capture.’ At that time, I tried filming many different things with an 8mm film camera. And among them, when I filmed rivers, water, and things like that — broadly speaking, nature — I felt, somehow, this is what I truly want to film. I was 19 years old then, and the feeling I had at that moment became, for me, the true starting point of my creative work and of filmmaking itself.”
“As I mentioned earlier, I loved drawing when I was a child. Looking back, I realize that I especially liked drawing things like plants and other natural subjects. And when I think back on it now, I also remember being deeply drawn to rivers and water from a very young age.”
“I became even more aware of this while making River Returns (2024). It prompted me to reflect on myself again, and I realized that my grandfather was a farmer, and in fact my family had been engaged in farming for generations, even before the war. So, I think that, in a sense, agriculture and work connected to nature are part of the blood that runs through me. Perhaps that is why I feel compelled to create these kinds of images—to capture nature in the way that I do.”
Psychocinema: And, what about sound?I would say that the way you approach sound within your films enhances the beauty of our imagery.
“I agree. For example, I don’t use much music. In Japan, what we call gekiban refers to film score or background music, but I’ve never really liked the idea of using music to express the emotions of a scene or of the characters on screen. Rather than doing that, I want the audience to listen carefully to the sounds that are already there—to the sounds that are resonating within the scene itself.”
“This overlaps a little with the previous question, but one of the major reasons I’ve become so committed to filming nature goes back to the two years I spent at film school after graduating from university. There I studied screenwriting, and the education emphasized that cinema is fundamentally about portraying human drama—that films are, above all, about depicting human beings.”
“But while I certainly believe that films depict people, I also felt that cinema is never only about human beings. Within the frame there isn’t just a person; there are so many other things as well. There is wind, there are stones, there are trees—countless elements exist within the image. So, I found myself questioning why we should portray only human beings. That never seemed quite right to me. Because of that, I’ve come to feel that I want to depict not only people but also everything that exists alongside them, treating non-human elements as equally important—as equals, in a sense.”
“I think that’s also reflected in the way I use sound. Rather than focusing solely on human drama, I’m interested in all the living details that inhabit a place—the sound of the wind rustling, for example, and all the subtle sounds that surround us. I want to express those things as well. That’s probably why my approach to sound has developed into the style it has today. And I believe that the subtle sounds of nature are brought to life thanks to the work of Hwang Young-Chang, who has been responsible for the sound design on all my feature films.”
Psychocinema: Most of your feature films are structured around the mystical beauty of nature. What made you decide to focus on the position of nature within the contemporary societal field through film?
“Originally, when I started, nature was less of a theme than a motif. What drew me was simply the desire to capture things that I found beautiful—things that made me think; I want to film this. That kind of longing or impulse was very strong at the beginning, and that was where everything started.”
“Ever since I was young, I have harboured a philosophical curiosity about what it means to be human—a being that is part of nature yet stands apart from it—but I was unable to explore this within the narratives of my films. To give just one example, when I was twenty, I travelled around India with an 8mm film camera, but at that time I was only able to make abstract films. But I think that for Japanese filmmakers, and probably for directors like Ryusuke Hamaguchi as well, the events of March 11, 2011—the Great East Japan Earthquake—had an enormous impact.”
“Looking back, I feel that my filmmaking changed completely before and after that event. Before then, my strongest motivation was simply to film beautiful landscapes and the things that fascinated me. But after the disaster, confronted with the earthquake, the tsunami, and the overwhelming force of nature, and at the same time with the presence of the nuclear power plant—a human-made structure—I found that I could no longer make films without thinking about the relationship between nature and the way human beings live.” In other words, after 2011, especially beginning with my first feature film The Albino’s Trees (2016), exploring those themes became absolutely essential for me. It became something I felt I had to address in my work.”
Psychocinema: Your first feature film, The Albino’s Trees (2016), turned around the idea of Omoiyari ga aru, the need for people to become thoughtful towards others or what is Other to them, be it people with different ideas or nature as such. What does this phrase mean to you in light of your oeuvre?
“Ever since The Albino’s Trees (2016), the central theme of my work has always been the Other—the Others. That theme has remained constant for me, but at the same time it is an extremely complex one. For me, “the Other” does not refer only to relationships between human beings. On one level, it is about people like you and me —it is about relationships between individuals. It is also about Japanese people and non-Japanese people; people who share the same religion and those who follow different religions; people from the same country and those from different countries.”
“The first question, then, is whether these Others can truly understand one another. Can we come to mutual understanding? Can we genuinely care about the other person? At the same time, however, for me the Other also includes everything that is not human. It includes nature, of course, but also—this may sound a little abstract—animals, plants, stones… in fact, everything. Everything that exists in this world apart from human beings.”
“And if we extend that idea even further, it also includes those who are no longer alive—those who have died, those who once lived. Aren’t they also Others? They, too, are things that exist outside of myself. So, the concept becomes very broad, perhaps overwhelmingly so. But ultimately, I feel that one of the reasons life has become so difficult today, and why society itself has become so troubled, is that we have come to think only about ourselves—only about those of us who are alive here and now. We have stopped looking beyond ourselves.”
“We no longer think about people who hold values different from our own, or about living beings other than ourselves. Nor do we think about those who lived before us. Beyond ourselves there exists an immeasurable world of others, yet I feel that we have lost the capacity to imagine them. More radically still, I mean those things that are invisible to us—those that are not physically present before our eyes. The question that matters most to me is whether we can still direct our thoughts toward what we cannot see, whether we can still imagine what lies beyond our immediate perception. That, I believe, is the single most important theme in my work.”
Psychocinema: People form groups around similarity and accepting Otherness, the radical dissimilarity between subjects, is quite difficult.
“To care about the Other is genuinely very difficult. It’s easy enough to say in words, but in a sense, it can easily become nothing more than an idealistic slogan. It isn’t something so simple. And yet, precisely because it is so difficult, I think we must not give up on it. We have to keep engaging with it. There will always be people whose values differ from ours, and there will always be people we simply cannot fully understand. That’s inevitable. Even between people, there are those we dislike or find difficult to get along with.”
“But even so, rather than falling into conflict, I think we have to ask whether there is another way. We may not be able to live together as lovers or as a married couple, but isn’t there a way for us to share this Earth without killing one another? I think that is something we must continue to reflect on. Because if we stop thinking about it—even now, as we can see—we end up with war. So, I feel that I have to keep thinking about these questions. At the same time, I know they are extraordinarily difficult. There are no easy answers.”
Psychocinema: Ring Wandering (2022) and River Returns (2024) approaches the effect of contemporary society on our relation to others and nature in a somewhat different way, by pointing out the difficulty by which we form connections with others within contemporary society. What causes, in your opinion, the source of this difficulty?
“That is an extremely difficult question. But I suppose it comes back to what we’ve been talking about all along. The way our society is structured today—whether we call it capitalism or something else—is fundamentally a system designed around making life easier, more convenient, and more comfortable for us. In one sense, that’s only natural, and we ourselves benefit from that convenience.”
“At the same time, though, I often depict older ways of living and older forms of Japanese society in my films. River Returns (2024), in particular, explores these themes. I have the feeling that people in the past understood living as something that wasn’t only about human beings. Their lives were connected with other forms of life—with trees, forests, and other living creatures. They also remained conscious of those who had lived before them, and of those who would come after them—the generations yet to be born. In other words, they understood their own lives as part of a much larger current, one that extended beyond the present moment. I think there was once a more intuitive sense of that kind of ecosystem—a broader web of relationships. Today, by contrast, our social system has become far more human-centered, and I feel that this has made our lives increasingly constrained and suffocating.”
“For The Albino’s Trees (2016)—my first feature film—I wrote something in my director’s statement that I was thinking about while making the film. The protagonist works as a wildlife culler; someone whose job is to kill wild animals that damage agricultural crops. What I was thinking about was this: if we want to eat meat today, we simply go to the supermarket, where neatly packaged meat is waiting for us. It’s incredibly convenient—we can buy it and eat it almost immediately. But if we stop and think about it, that meat is there because a living creature was killed and butchered before it reached our table. Today, we no longer have to witness those brutal aspects ourselves. That’s precisely what makes modern life so convenient—we can enjoy eating without ever confronting that reality.”
“And yet, the fact remains that whenever we eat, whenever we sustain our own lives, our existence is inevitably connected to taking the lives of other living beings. That connection is always there. The problem is that we can no longer see it. Those realities have been completely shut out from our everyday experience, allowing us to live comfortably within a world built entirely around human convenience. Of course, that convenience is genuinely valuable. Once people have become accustomed to it, it’s very difficult to imagine giving it up.”
“But I think this is precisely where one of the greatest difficulties of our time lies: it has become increasingly hard to perceive how our own lives are intertwined with those of other living beings. That relationship has become obscured—almost invisible—and I think that is one of the central challenges we face today.”
Psychocinema: The modern subject – the subject of capitalism – has, first and foremost, a relationship to themselves rather than the reality of Otherness.
“It’s an extremely difficult issue. I don’t think it’s necessarily true that everything was better in the past. Of course it wasn’t. Every era has had its own social problems and its own forms of hardship. And in many respects, I think we enjoy much greater freedom today than people did in the past.”
“So, I’m certainly not trying to suggest that we should simply affirm or idealize the past in its entirety. When I depict the past in my work, that’s not because I believe everything about it was good. Rather, I’m trying to reflect on the society we live in today. As you were saying, we’ve come to inhabit a profoundly human-centered worldview—one in which people are preoccupied almost exclusively with themselves and with other human beings.”
“Yet I think many of us, somewhere deep down, feel that we’ve reached a kind of impasse. There’s a sense of suffocation, of being trapped within this way of living. And I wonder whether the clues for changing that—finding a way beyond it, or breaking out of it—might lie in the ways people lived in the past. Perhaps there is something in earlier ways of life that can help us imagine a different relationship with the world today. I’m not sure I’ve really answered your question. But that’s how I see it.”
Psychocinema: Every societal structure produces its own problems.
“Yes, but ultimately, we have to think about how human beings can become better. There are certainly problems with the systems we have today, and I think we should continue thinking about better systems and better ways of living. At the same time, though, there are limits to what can be changed through systems themselves. Marxism, for example, didn’t turn out as ideally as people had hoped, and there are many other examples like that.”
“But within all of this, I have always felt that film, or art more generally, has the potential to do something that social systems cannot fully express or make up for. It can perhaps heal something in the human heart, or somehow make up for something that is missing in our lives. I have personally received that kind of support from art throughout my own life. So, I don’t really believe that films can change society’s systems in any direct way. But I do hope that, through film, I can somehow help make people’s inner lives a little better—that I might give someone a sense of hope, or perhaps the strength they need to keep living.”
Psychocinema: Now, with your fourth film, Sleeping in the Red Earth (2026), you aim to tell the biographical story of amateur archaeologist Tadahiro Aizawa. What prompted you to turn his story into a feature film?
“First of all, the reason I came to know about and became interested in a person named Aizawa Tadahiro was when I was still very young, around ten years old. He had written a book- a kind of autobiography – and it was widely used as educational material and was even included in school textbooks.”
“He was an archaeologist and had made some very important discoveries. There was a passage in the textbook describing the exact moment when he made one of those discoveries—the moment he found a stone tool embedded in a wall of earth. When I read that passage at the age of ten, it left a very strong impression on me. I was almost shocked by it. I had never even heard of him before that, but that impression stayed with me for a very long time. But Aizawa himself wasn’t really an academic or a scholar. He was an amateur archaeologist who taught himself and carried out excavations on his own. Through all of this, he made a discovery that ultimately became a catalyst for changing history, but his contribution wasn’t always recognized directly. In the end, much of the credit for his achievements was actually taken by university professors.”
“So, in a sense, you could say that he lived a rather unfortunate or unrecognized life. But he himself wasn’t really motivated by a desire to become famous or to make some great discovery that would change the world. Rather, he was simply and purely devoted to engaging with stones—or, more precisely, with things that are outside of humanity itself. For him, that meant things like stones, which are inorganic matter, and the past. After all, digging into the earth means accessing the past. It means entering into the world of things that existed before us, things that lived before us, as well as stones, earth, and other inanimate matter.”
“When I read what he wrote, I get the sense that he engaged with these things—earth, stones, the past—as equals, almost in the same way that one person might engage with another human being. I think that, as a child, something about this deeply struck me. Perhaps I was drawn to something about the way he lived his life. So, although this film is also a biography in the sense that it depicts his life, rather than faithfully tracing the events of his life, I have tried to interpret his spirituality, or the way he saw the world, in my own way. The film is therefore quite heavily fictionalized.”
Psychocinema: Your fourth film seem to shy away from the mystical, yet not from the past. Can you lift the veil on how the story of Aizawa helps you elaborate your thematical preoccupations?
“There was a call for applications looking for a director, producer, and production team to make a film about the life of Tadahiro Aizawa. When I saw it, I was already interested in Aizawa, and I also felt that projects like this in Japan often tend to become what are commonly called gotouchi eiga—films made to promote or revitalize a particular region. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything inherently wrong with those kinds of films. But, to be honest, I was very concerned that if this project were made in the conventional way, it could end up becoming a film that simply said, There was this great and important person named Aizawa, and praised him and his achievements.”
“I really didn’t want to make that kind of film. What interested me was Aizawa’s way of life, his spirituality, and the way he saw the world. And, in a sense—and this may sound a little presumptuous—I felt that this was something only I could make a film about. I really wanted to make it. So, I eventually gave a presentation, and among several proposals, our project was selected. That’s how I ended up being given the opportunity to direct the film.”
Psychocinema: A little bit of pride does not hurt.
“With every film I make, I always think about how I can create something better than my previous work, or how I can move forward and push myself further. So, with this film, I really wanted to take on things that I hadn’t been able to do in my past films, Ring Wandering (2022) and River Returns (2024). In that sense, I feel that I was able to challenge myself to do something different from my previous work.”
“As I mentioned earlier when we were talking about Aizawa, the film is set in 1949. And 1949 was, of course, right after the war in Japan. So, although the postwar period isn’t necessarily depicted explicitly or directly in the film, it is very much present beneath the surface. The war has left wounds in all of these people’s hearts. In their lives, there is inevitably something they lost because of the war—something that was taken away from them or that they can no longer recover.”
“And when we look at the time we’re living in now, there are wars happening again, and it’s possible that Japan itself could become involved in a war. I think that’s simply part of the social reality we are facing today. So, in this film, I wanted to explore just how deeply war can wound people’s hearts. That’s something I’ve also explored in Ring Wandering and my earlier work, but this time I wanted to take on the challenge of depicting it through the inner lives of multiple characters.”
“So, there’s one more thing. I think that, in a way, this film brings together many of the themes I’ve explored in my work up to now—things like contemporary society and nature, or the living and the dead, which you’ve mentioned several times. In that sense, I feel that the film is also exploring something mysterious or even mystical. So, as a kind of culmination of the work I’ve done so far, I think it has become an even more interesting film. I’m attempting something more complex than before. But I also feel that, as a film, it has become more powerful as a result.”
Psychocinema: I genuinely look forward to see your fourth feature film.