This female director has built a temple of memories unique to her through her cinematic storytelling. In this temple, the boundaries between documentary and fiction are gently dissolved, and private narratives and collective traumas permeate each other in the play of light and shadow.

From the caves of the Battle of Okinawa to the fingers of her mother at work, from the dim echoes of abandoned mines to the space of light and shadow in the cinema, she has always, with the keen perception unique to women, carried out cinematic archaeology of the essence of memory within the realms of essay films or prose films and hybrid documentaries. 

Recording with Mother ‘Working Hands’

2025

Highlights: Resonance of images across generations, a silent family letter about the body, labor, and love.

This is the latest short film created by Kaori Oda. Here, Kaori Oda returns to a more personal family narrative, recounting her mother's life experiences and documenting the interactions between herself and her mother. The short film adopts the method of static photography, gazing at the working mother with a gentle gaze.

Underground (4K)

2024

Highlights: Memory spores in the veins of the earth, a piece of cinematographic anthropology that shuttles between the thresholds of life and death.

Kaori Oda continues to use the 16mm film lens to explore the traumatic memory layer in Japan's crust. From the tunnels of Sapporo Municipal Subway to the vein-like caves of Okinawa's war trenches, she documents, with an archaeologist's precision, those buried collective narratives. The film follows a fictional “shadow” as its guide, its projections slowly constructing an underground shrine without deities - where memory grows like cave mycelium, breathing between the living and the dead.

FUKUSHIMA with Béla Tarr (4K)

2024

Highlights: Alchemy of images on the soil of disaster, a meta-documentary that deconstructs cinema itself.

This documentary, filmed by Kaori Oda, records a two-week film production workshop held by Béla Tarr in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, in February 2024. This work records the personality traits that Béla Tarr displayed during his interactions with the participants - sometimes he was extremely radical. For viewers familiar with Béla Tarr work, this documentary will be a very interesting entry point. Deliberately eschewing moving shots, Kaori Oda uses static compositions to capture the spontaneous, unpredictable nature of the creative process.

GAMA

2023

Highlights: Images penetrating the shadows of history, a meditation ritual about war relics and ghost narratives.

This is one of Kaori Oda's most renowned short film works. This film is a historical account of the Battle of Okinawa in the 1940s. The “shadow” continues to appear in the form of a girl in white (ghost), and her suffering is wrapped in language, which continues to echo deep in the cave.

OUR CINEMAS

2020

Highlights: An archaeological experiment of light and shadow, deconstructing the spatial memory of the cinema.

This is a short experimental documentary film. The Cine Nouveau cinema constantly appears amidst the light and shadow of the images. The camera slowly pans across the walls, seats and lights of the cinema, and every audience member will recall their own stories related to the cinema. 

CENOTE

2019

Highlights: Underwater Memory Altar, a double concerto of civilizations engraved in the limestone fractures

Kaori Oda used her super 8 camera as a diving mask to dive deep into the cenote on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. These caves reveal their fatal attraction under the camera lens. The stalactites that have been accumulating on the rock face for thousands of years, and the suddenly surging underground currents, form the eternal dialectic between the source of life and the trap of death. Combining the audio and visual materials in a manner similar to the accumulation of geological layers, this work has completed a contemporary interpretation of “sacredness” .

Wind Church

2018

Highlights: The soul resonance of concrete, a silent dialogue about time, architecture and faith

Document the restoration process of a church. This church in Kobe City was designed by Tadao Ando and completed in 1986. It is one of his “Church Trilogy”. This short film clearly shows the Wind Church before and after the restoration.

Toward a Common Tenderness

2017

Highlights: Continent-connecting visual showcase, in-depth self-analysis on gaze ethnics

This work, which was highly praised as having as an “ineffable beauty in the style of Robert Bresson” at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, represents a profound inquiry by Kaori Oda into the essence of documentary film-making. Taking the materials she collected during her study at Béla Tarr Film Academy from 2013 to 2016 as a clue, the film integrates private footage of Japanese families and segments of life in Bosnia and Herzegovina, weaving a web of gazes spanning two continents on the silver screen.

This film can be said to be one of Kaori Oda's most renown works. Those daily insights captured and frozen in the film are not only the director’s affirmation of his own identity, but also a poetic testimony to the power of the film medium.

Cine Nouveau 20th Anniversary Project

2017

Highlights: An audiovisual love letter to the cinema, witnessing cinema's enduring evolution

Commissioned by Cine Nouveau, Kaori Oda filmed a documentary for the cinema's 20th anniversary, detailing the renovation work of the cinema. In the 1970s, “Cine Nouveau” stood as a symbol of the new era of film that Japanese independent art theaters striven to initiate. 

Aragane

2015

Highlights: Sensory fugue in the dark mine, an industrial apocalypse engraved deep in the rock strata

The film won the Special Mention Award in the New Asian Currents Section of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. This is Kaori Oda 's first work created during her study at Béla Tarr Film Academy in Sarajevo. With 68 minutes of uncompromising cinematic alchemy, she transforms a Bosnian coal mine into the viscera of a gigantic, roaring creature.

While the camera makes its way through the gloomy corridors, the glow from the miners' helmets now rends the darkness asunder, only to be swallowed by the encroaching chaos in the next instant. Adopting subversive sensory code, this work turns the documentary into a dark ritual of sacrifice. It's the mine observing us, not the other way around.

FLASH

2015

Highlights: the transnational railways, unforgettable as retinal imprints

The story kicks off in a jostling train carriage from Sarajevo to Zagreb. Exotic scenery outside the window rushes by in a liquid blur. Kaori Oda's eyes are glued to the window. She captures each split-second scene with her camera, turning it into a memory-keeper that freezes time. Scenery on this journey shifts like mirages, at times sharply defined, at others dissolving into a haze. Meanwhile, sound-wave specimens etch themselves onto these visual impressions. Together, they converge to create a singular “geographical memory montage”.

Kaori Oda uses her camera in the same way a geological hammer digs into the earth's strata, exploring differences and connections among civilizations. It is a contemporary response to Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalgia, but also an exploration in the eternal rhythm of machinery. Eventually, people can still reach those precious memories hidden deep within their hearts.