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!

For some reason, there is very little snow in the winter of 2020 on the Shiretoko Peninsula, a special place located in the northernmost part of Japan where rare wild animals coexist with humans. The typical drift ice hasn’t appeared yet, either. Although worried, the inhabitants of the village Shari continue their daily affairs: the shepherd bakes buns, a hunter prepares a dinner with venison, a fisherman picks up trash from the sea and another person observes flying squirrels in her garden. In these rural surroundings, director Yoshigai Nao, who is also a dancer and choreographer, introduces a mysterious, fiery-red creature, like a walking scarecrow. This turns her delicate, documentary observations into an idyllic, yet disquieting fairytale. Folklore, arts and crafts, oral history, ecology, and mythology blend elegantly in this visual poem. Inside the gym, schoolchildren fight the red creature with all their might, Sumo-style, while outside the bears skip their wintersleep.