in conversation: neo sora

Portrait of Neo Sora on the set of Sugar Glass Bottle. Image by Kohki Hasei.

Neo Sora (born 1991) is a filmmaker, artist, and translator living in Tokyo and New York. He graduated in Philosophy and Film Studies from Wesleyan University. Sora works across narrative films, documentaries, music videos, and concert films. His works have been presented and exhibited at venues such as Reborn - Art Festival (2017), Istituto Italiano di Cultura/Tokyo, G/P Gallery/Tokyo, Singapore Biennale (2019), the Dojima River Biennale (2019), Locarno International Film Festival (2020), Watari-um Museum of Contemporary Art, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions (2022). Filmmaker Magazine has named Neo one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film. He was also a Fellow at the 2022 Sundance Screenwriters and Director's Lab.

LUCIJA ŠUTEJ: What was your introduction to cinema and what led you to pursue it actively?

NEO SORA: I always watched films growing up. In high school, going to the cinema was part of how I spent time with friends and we figured out how to trick the system to get in without paying - using side elevators (laugh). Prior to film, I was interested in music and drawing, and while I was quite good at them in school, I wasn't exceptional. I enjoyed it though and developed a sense of visuals, composition, and shadows. 

Originally, I wanted to study Anthropology - specifically linguistics. I was interested in how different languages shape our thoughts and reality. Unfortunately, the linguistics professor I hoped to study with retired the year I got into college. I still took some of the classes but decided to try philosophy and cinema as well. Ultimately, cinema was for me a way to combine and investigate all my different interests - music, drawing, photography, philosophy, and cultural anthropology.

LŠ: Did you ever have a band?

NS: I played bass in a few bands and I did some electronic music. Nothing serious (laugh).

LŠ: Which films left the biggest impression in your childhood?

NS: My parents exposed me to European and Japanese films at home. There was one time, I had friends over and we watched Bernardo Bertolucci's Dreamers - a film about sexual liberation and the Parisian landscape of 1968. My parents returned home after dinner and joined us at the most awkward moment when a character was made to masturbate while the others watched him. Parents (laugh)! They sat down with us, saying “we love this film!”  and continued to watch the film as we awkwardly tried to ignore the overtly sexual scene in front of our eyes. I also remember watching 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was about 2 years old with my father, which terrified me as a child and I absolutely hated it then - but now I appreciate it. Definitely, a big influence were Godard's Pierrot le Fou, Edward Yang with his portrayals of Taipei, and Werner Herzog.

LŠ: Off topic - speaking of exploring landscapes; did you read Herzog's book on his journey from Germany to France, to rush to his dying friend.

NS: Oh, you mean: Of Walking on Ice? Yeah, love it. Aguirre, the Wrath of God by Herzog blew me away while at university and years later, I also discovered that Edward Yang was influenced by it. Yang is one of the directors whom I really admire.

LŠ: How has your time at Wesleyan University shaped your approach to cinema?

NS: My university had a very specific, formalistic approach to film analysis and history. The method was focused on analyzing the film solely through images and sounds, with less of a focus on the social, ideological, and philosophical context surrounding it. I was disappointed by this because I was studying philosophy - I was interested in how philosophers interpreted cinema. I appreciate now what I learned at university - an analytical way of understanding and constructing film. But at the time, I hated it. I was drawn to filmmakers they didn't necessarily like - like Oshima or Godard, who had an intellectual approach.

LŠ: You are also part of a collective Zakkubalan - an independent film and art production company based between New York City and Tokyo, with Albert Tholen and Aiko Masubuchi. What ideas brought you together and what were you trying to address in the filmmaking industry?

NS: Zakkubalan is tied to my personal approach to film - I know if I put myself in an environment too long, I'd get used to it and it would influence me consciously or subconsciously. The more you learn a certain system's rules - the better you get at it. I didn't want to engage in filmmaking solely as a job. I saw friends going to Hollywood to be camera assistants, assistant directors, working on things they weren't necessarily engaged with, or doing commercials, just because it was filmmaking - which I didn't want to do.

Behind the scenes images of Sugar Glass Bottle (2022). Images by Kohki Hasei.

I decided to work in translation to make money and only accept filmmaking jobs I really wanted to do. Those two things often overlapped. In New York, the pool of people with both Japanese translation and filmmaking skills is so small - so projects requiring both usually found me. It allowed me to learn different aspects of filmmaking, which was super helpful. And concurrently I worked via the collective. So, Zakkubalan was formed with Albert (Tholen), right after we graduated from university as a moniker for the different projects we do together - music videos, documentaries or art projects.

Neo Sora and Albert Tholen on the set of The Chicken. Image by Tess Ayano.

The collective later expanded to include my partner and film curator, Aiko Masubuchi. I would say that a way to think of our collective is just like a table. Where everybody comes to the dining table to eat food, and then other times, the table is a work table where we clear off the food to work on an art project or film project. We do not have a manifesto or anything like that. Albert and I would often use Zakkubalan as a vehicle to explore formal ideas about cinema that wouldn't work in a narrative film format - ideas about space requiring multiple projections, sound and landscape. These ideas would spill over from our thinking about cinema into art. For example, in 2017, we created a film in Japan for the festival called Reborn Art Festival. We were struck by the landscape of Ishinomaki, which had been devastated by the 3.11 tsunami, and through our project, we attempted to recreate the emotional impact of the landscape by embedding moving images with hints of narrative. For that project, Seachange, Zakkubalan expanded to include our friend, actor and filmmaker, Yuta Koga, who later starred in Sugar Glass Bottle.

Zakubbalan Collective, 2023, Kobe, Japan. Image by Shina Peng.

LŠ: You are also part of another artists’ collective Lunch Bee House, where you shot and co-directed an ethnographic documentary and art project Ainu Neno An Ainu. The documentary focuses on a remote village in Hokkaido, where the indigenous population within Japan keeps their culture and language alive. Could we learn more of the collective? And your time creating the documentary about Ainu culture?

NS: Going back to my university years, I was very interested in anthropology. That interest persisted after graduating, and I was thinking a lot about the history of colonization in the US and how it continues to this day. I also realized that I didn't really know the colonial history of Japan that well. Japan has a very deep-rooted history as a colonizer of many peoples, including the Ainu people in northern Japan.

Also, at a similar time, my father had given me this CD of recordings of Ainu music. I remembered that I had been playing bass and really liked funk music. Traditional Japanese music, I wouldn't say, is funky (laugh), but there were a couple of songs on the CD that had a completely different groove. I was doing readings and research - thinking maybe I could make a documentary about it. Even though I had the desire to go into fiction filmmaking, I felt like I needed to learn more about the world to come up with an interesting story. And I hoped that doing a documentary would perhaps show me a world in a way that I hadn't known before. 

As I returned to Japan, I met Valy Thorsteinsdottir, who was interested in doing a podcast about the Ainu people. She also had a friend, Laura Liverani, an Italian photographer who had taken a few portraits of the Ainu and wanted to expand her series. Following a trip to the town of Nibutani, we decided to do a documentary there. Funnily, Laura and I had only met one time before, and now we were in this rural town in Hokkaido, living together and making a documentary. We expected not to film anything for the first couple of weeks until we made a relationship with everybody - but it turned out that people in Nibutani were really welcoming. By the end of the first day, we were already filming! They welcomed us into their community, inviting us to dinners that would break out into song. The main family that took us in, who I'm still personally very close friends with, is the Sekine/Kaizawa family. The matriarch and grandmother of the extended family, Yukiko Kaizawa, used to run a restaurant called Lunch House Bee, where she would serve motorcyclists or passers by. The name of her restaurant eventually became the name of our collective. 

Neo Sora and Laura Liverani on the set of Ainu Neno An Ainu. Image credit: Takuya Kawakami.

Collective Lunch Bee House in Reykjavik in 2015. Image by Laura Liverani.

Lunch House Bee, image by Takuya Kawakami.

What particularly drew us to Nibutani was that Ainu culture was very much practiced in the habits and routines of daily life. At the restaurant, they would make normal food that could be called Japanese, but on the side, there would be a dish made out of wild vegetables, very Ainudish. Yukiko would go back to her work making traditional Ainu weaving called attus, and in the morning, she would go to the mountains to gather mountain vegetables based on traditional Ainu knowledge of what to eat.

LŠ: Documentary as a format holds a special place in your work - but would you ever describe yourself as a documentary filmmaker?

NS: I see myself more as a fiction filmmaker with an interest in the world. However, documentary and fiction are different sides of the same coin. Making a documentary is an act of creating a story that cannot be untangled with the act of dramatizing or devising something. In a sense, it is fiction!

When you commit to making a documentary, you are committing to the ethical practice of truth-telling—an attempt not to mislead somebody from the truth that you were witness to. Similarly, in fiction, you are expressing a truth about some kind of subjective emotion. There's a script and a story, reacting to the actual world we live in. Aiko introduced me to filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi, known for his crazy fiction films with video effects, who says, “Film is journalism." This is an interesting insight, especially coming from a filmmaker who destroys the form of cinema and creates fantastical fiction films. As a child of World War II, all of his films lead back to communicating a truth about war that only fiction can communicate. This is similar to Werner Herzog's concept of “ecstatic truth," where even though you're lying or fictionalizing in film, you're trying to communicate some kind of truth. I recently experienced this through a viewing of a theatre performance called Prisoners of the Occupation (Tokyo Version), by Einat Weizman and translated/developed by Maho Watanabe, which recreated the experience of being imprisoned by the Israeli occupation. Japanese actors performed as Palestinian prisoners alongside an actual former Palestinian prisoner. Through this act of creating fiction, they were creating a documentary of an experience that no camera could ever capture in reality. It made me think about how powerful the act of creating fiction can be as a vehicle for truth-telling, especially as a method of affirming and archiving the resilience of a people and a culture that is resisting ethnic cleansing and genocide.

At the same time, I don't think I want to make documentaries anymore because, as a documentary filmmaker, you have a profound responsibility towards the people you're filming. I started to feel like I was replicating the structure of colonization through making the documentary, coming into a town with a camera, capturing images without paying, and expanding a narrative of what life is like. To counter that, I wanted to be as truthful to my own experience and decided that the only way to overcome this structure was to have a lifelong relationship with my friends through the documentary, in addition to fighting all forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism that persists today. The beauty of the relationship is the most important thing that the film brought me, not the documentary itself.

Some documentary filmmakers have lifelong relationships with many people. Personally, I prefer to spend quality time and develop meaningful relationships with very few people. I don't think I'm in a place right now where I can start a whole new lifelong relationship through another documentary. In that way, doing a fiction film is a little less burdensome to me.

LŠ: You also worked with your dad, Ryuichi Sakamoto, on two films about his work. Whereas CODA is a documentary, Opus is a concert film. It would be great to hear of your work together.

NS: So, for CODA, I was a cinematographer - and Stephen Nomura Schible was making the film. And then my father got cancer, and the director wanted to stop filming - he thought it was too much of an imposition to continue. But my parents were like: “Why? You are a filmmaker, and this is an amazing story." Still, the director felt uncomfortable, which was reasonable - so as I had just graduated from university, my parents suggested that I film the scenes at home. I shot a lot of footage, but we only used a small part. My parents valued the artwork over any awkwardness and wanted the director to feel the burning passion that it had to be made, even if it was difficult. I asked Schible what I should be filming and what kind of story he wanted to tell - essentially doing what he asked. However, I was able to use my privileged position and relationship with my father to film in a more intimate way than a stranger could.

After that experience, my parents realized how easy it was to have me shoot stuff or take photos for them, rather than having strangers come to their house. They would occasionally ask me to do this for them, which was a way of giving back to my parents. The big version of that ended up being Opus, which came about when my father got ill again. They wanted to do a project in the capacity of a concert, but he couldn't play one - so they asked me to make the film. My intention was to be a conduit for my father's ideas rather than bringing too much of myself into it. We didn't discuss Opus extensively because we had a professional separation in what we were both in charge of. He was in charge of the music, and I was in charge of the filmmaking. He left it up to me on how to film it and my job was to figure out how to best replicate the concert experience through cinema.

Behind the scenes images of Opus, directed by Neo Sora with cinematographer Bill Kirstein, also the author of the photographs.

To film something and have it feel like a unified work - you have to think about a core theme or idea to focus on as your main pillar throughout the film. For Opus, because the original motivation for making a film - doing a concert in the cinema, was due to his lack of physicality and health to do concerts, and I decided that the film should focus on physicality. Every creative decision stemmed from this core idea of looking at someone's physicality or communicating it. Black and white was an effective way to convey details of hands and the piano as an object. The main editing motif of the film is the shifting lighting over the course of the film to express changes in time, which also came from the idea of tangibility. My father was thinking a lot about time and its existence - likely based on the fact that he didn't have much time left. This idea of changing, passing and lost time was important. We had a really good cinematographer, sound recordist, and my father was playing music - as a director, you end up having to represent the film, but in a way, I also don't quite feel like I should even take credit for it. There is also always a balance between how much to follow or not follow the sound and image, and how much to counterbalance things. 

Neo Sora with cinematographer Bill Kirstein. Image courtesy of Neo Sora.

LŠ: Was Opus your first concert film?

NS: So, what was helpful for Opus was a concert film I did in the past between two jazz pianists, Jason Moran and Dairo Suga. It was an event planned and produced by a Japanese person, held at the Steinway factory in Queens, New York. In the middle of the factory, these two pianists were playing together. It was great, but a little different because there was an audience there, so there wasn't too much we could do in terms of experimentation.

Also with Albert, we did a few music videos - for Anthony Naples's music video, we went out to the forest in New Jersey for night with projectors, strobe lights, and cameras. Running around in the woods, shooting stuff. 

LŠ: Lastly, I wanted to touch upon your wonderful photographic work, and how it developed in tandem with your moving image practice? You already mentioned it all started from street photography.

NS: That's still what I do today (laugh). I take my camera around wherever I go. Over time, I gradually started to get a little bit bored with street photography - at one stage, very similar images arose without a real underlying concept. And so I started experimenting with different visions - I really appreciate this contrast between the idealism that's being presented in these panels of nature as opposed to the urban landscape. It makes one think of how these centralised surroundings draw on the landscapes.

Over time, I started experimenting with the materiality of celluloid as well. I've always really liked celluloid film and the one way to keep my relationship with celluloid going in a cheaper and more accessible way was through photography.I do small interventions to photographs like scratching, drawing, or painting directly on film, and it feeds back into my work. My film work is pretty narrative-driven as opposed to experimental moving images, which I enjoy. There are different approaches to photography and I am intrigued by the work of  Jeff Wall.

Homage to Kurosawa. (2019) - 35mm film, watercolor paint.

Homage to Morandi (2016) - 35mm film.

Landscape #1(2018) - 35mm film

Landscape #2. (2018) - digital *All images courtesy of the artist.