A shadow reveals its form from the darkness underground. It communicates with a woman's consciousness, and she begins to see fragmentary memories that transcend time and place, as if daydreaming. The shadow takes on the woman's form and travels. Situating itself in places invisible from above ground, it traces what once happened there, listening to the human memories buried in the flow of time.

Forum audiences know Nao Yoshigai as the shadowy figure from Kaori Oda‘s Underground (2025), a young woman as a medium between two realms: everyday kitchen gestures and haptic explorations of caves and the past. In her directorial debut, this artistic all-rounder uses a similar hybrid form to confront her soul and inner life – and with it the universal questions of life and death, stories and images, materiality and spirituality. Following her mother’s passing, she seeks refuge and calm in a Zen temple to physically and mentally process what has engulfed her completely, paralysed her, stopped her in her tracks: her grief. In these Zen Buddhist surroundings, she learns to move her attention away from a human-centred perspective and on to the small hand movements and gestures, objects and rituals that make each single grain of rice a sensation. What in philosophy might be deemed an experience of transcendence is portrayed by Yoshigai with humour and sensual grace: she augments the retreat with family photos, performances and hand-drawn animations, from the rumbling stomach to the intestinal tract – and back to humility, acceptance, liberation. A moving three-acter without a story!