＊This is a translation of an interview originally published on November 15, 2022, on Tokyo Artpoint Project News, a blog on the Arts Council Tokyo website.
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Launched in 2022, KINO Meeting is an art project that organizes filmmaking workshops for non-Japanese people living in Japan.
The various participants form a film crew and head out into the streets. Wandering around Tokyo, they talk to each other, exploring their roots and their relationships with the areas and communities where they live, and eventually complete a film.
This project also aims to build a community through the collaborative activity of filmmaking, and research and develop a participant-led workshop program.
KINO Meeting’s name derives from the German word for cinema. It encompasses the concept of moving around while using the medium of film and moving image to encounter and engage in dialogue with a wide range of people over the course of the project.
KINO Meeting is run by Abe Kota, a designer also known for directing the film Whose city is it? about graffiti artists in four cities in Brazil. We spoke to him about how the project started and his activities to date.
Possibilities for Interacting with Others through the Act of Making
Q. How did KINO Meeting start?
I’ve worked with KINO Meeting co-organizer Arts Council Tokyo since 2020 on two programs for Tokyo Art Research Lab.
The first, in 2020, was Cross Way Tokyo: Involvement with People from Other Backgrounds through Self-Transformation. The other was Multicultural Film MakingーCreating a film together with people from different backgrounds in 2021. KINO Meeting is an extension of these two programs.
The departure point for these endeavors was my own personal uncertainty about wanting to communicate and interact with non-Japanese people but not knowing how to go about it, and so eventually chickening out. I reached out to others who had the same issue and tried to discuss with them precisely what was holding us back, and Cross Way Tokyo was the first result of this.
Q. You previously made a film, Whose city is it?, about graffiti artists in Brazil. When you work with migrants and foreign-born people in Japan, what kind of challenges do you experience?
I lived in São Paulo for half a year between 2018 and 2019. The streets are filled with people from all walks of life; it’s a real melting pot. Needless to say, the gap between rich and poor is very stark, and we can’t just say everything is great, but it was a city in which you can feel everyone’s individuality.
In Brazil, I was a traveler and a minority. When I came back to Japan with that on my mind, I now became aware that I was part of a majority and when coming into contact with people from other backgrounds, I felt very uncomfortable about even just trying to find out about the background of someone from a minority. It was like I was consuming their background, just enjoying it for kicks. The ignorance about lots of history that I felt when I was outside Japan also contributed to my hesitancy. In Cross Way Tokyo, I tried to share that anxiety with various others.
Concretely, the members of the project walked around the city, interviewing each other about how we felt when we came face to face with people from other backgrounds, and then we attempted to express that through different mediums, such as writing, photography, moving image, and so on. What I came to realize was that when it came to interacting with others, doing so through the act of making something was, for me, the most natural and full of potential. And so I started thinking about making a film with people from different backgrounds. This then led to the next project, Multicultural Film Making.
Aiming for Interesting Films, Proactively Made by Participants
The Multicultural Film Making workshop was split into two. First, the people with different backgrounds who applied to the open call walked around the city together. They separated into groups and interviewed each other about their backgrounds, roots, and feelings about Japanese communities, and then took photographs and filmed a documentary about each participant. This activity was called Cinema Portrait.
After that, Tei Ushin, who is from Taiwan and studied film at university, put these stories together into a script, which she then directed as a fiction film that everyone helped make.
Almost no one involved had any prior experience of making a film, but I gained many insights over the course of the shoot. Above all, the completed film, New Tokyo Tour, was just so interesting. The participants formed a community and I also sensed that our approach could be taken further in the future as a workshop methodology, and this led to me continuing it as KINO Meeting.
Q. Concretely, what were the possibilities you sensed about the collaborative activity that is filmmaking?
One of the biggest was when we held a screening and talk of the finished film at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and all the participants who appeared onstage seemed to have such fun. You can tell from the film that everyone was engaged in making it proactively and using their own initiative. This kind of multicultural program has a tendency to result in something in which the participants just follow the themes set by the organizers. But I felt that with our film, we were able to get beyond that.
During the making of the film, people were assigned a role like cameraman and so on, but everyone worked really hard because they all felt like the film was “theirs.” On a film set, there’s a director, so the conditions can never truly be equal for everyone in the most basic sense of the word. And yet, everyone sought out their own role and complemented each other’s efforts, triggering communication and a situation in which strangers came together to form a team.
Our aim was not just to make an equal community, but also make an interesting film. That we were able to do this as a team left me with the greatest sense of potential.
Entrusting Projects to Past Participants
Q. KINO Meeting launched in 2022 and held its first workshop in the Ikebukuro area in July. What did you do in the workshop?
KINO Meeting is very different from the previous projects in that it is held in various places around Tokyo. The first event took place in Ikebukuro and we recruited participants who felt attached to the area.
The workshop started with a Cinema Portrait done in groups of three. We then tried something new, where they watched the films each had made, and then did what we called “triangle interviews” in which the three participants would discuss what they had in common. Based on those things in common, they worked together to make a single film in the area—in the case of the first workshop, Ikebukuro.
They continued their discussions about the things they had in common, interviewed each other, and talked together about which shots they needed, and then filmed that on location. The editing was also done as a three. The workshop itself lasted four days, with the filming and editing done over three of the days and a screening on the final day. And then the next workshop takes place in a different location.
Q. What were the workshop participants like?
There were teams that had lively debates and others who were rather quiet. It was a really mixed bag. Given the short production schedule, we did worry, but ultimately three interesting films—Metamorphosis, Secret, Japan Standard Time—were completed. After the screenings, the participants got talking and didn’t want to leave. It felt like a valuable experience for them.
We also introduced another aspect, which was asking past Multicultural Film Making participants to be “workshop crew.” This was an intermediary role between the participants and us, leading the workshop activities. As people with experience and understanding of our ideas, they helped create the films with the participants.
Any arrangement in which the divisions between the members of the team are too sharply defined will result in filmmaking that feels like it doesn’t belong to you, and a workshop that is too formal, so I wanted to avoid this most of all. As such, I’m ultimately just a kind of master of ceremonies and don’t intervene in the creative process. KINO Meeting aims to involve people from past projects and sessions as workshop crew and subsequently in running things, in the hope that they eventually take a proactive role.
Q. It’s like the previous participants take part in subsequent sessions as mentors, forming a crosscutting community.
That’s right. Each group had a previous participant providing support, which naturally affected the finished works. I want to increase the amount of involvement such previous participants have in running the workshops, and so the project will evolve in ways that we cannot do by ourselves, which is a very interesting way for things to develop.
Providing a Frame for Making a Work That Goes Beyond Being an Experience
Q. You always call this finished videos “works.” Is there something you do so that the participants approach it like they are making a work of art, not just documentary footage?
I don’t want this project to end as just an experience. It’s not only about having fun with a professional camera; I want the participants to really make a film work that is interesting and will be well received by others. But a kind of structure is needed to bring that out, so I am always designing that from scratch. This is what really occupies our minds the most.
Concretely speaking, what we are doing is turning the process of making a film into a quite elaborate workshop. The participants interview each other and they film scenes where they are sitting around in the city, and so on. In terms of the order of which things are filmed or what needs to be done, it’s pretty systematic. It doesn’t actually allow for much freedom.
That framework or mold is a frame for the participants to see the city. If they want a shot of someone sitting in the city, they need to find a suitable place to sit. That is an important part of the program, prompting them to re-examine their relationship with the city.
The participants are all looking for whatever they find interesting within that “mold,” and there are groups that follow the rules, and also groups that ignore the rules and kind of go rogue, and that’s where things get really interesting.
We are still trying to figure out to what extent we should set rules or tolerate deviations from that framework. I actually relocated to Kochi this spring due to another production project, and am currently not closely involved with how things are arranged. The other members of the team are really trying their best and testing out lots of things. That process of adjustment will surely continue for some time.
Interesting Works Emerge from Noise (Alternative Perspectives)
Q. During the workshops and the conversations after the screenings, is there anything the participants said or did that made a particular impression on you?
This isn’t a representative example, but there was someone who was studying at art college in Japan. When she took part in a university social gathering for the first time, the Japanese students started waxing lyrical about old anecdotes from high school and she felt unable to participate in that conversation. She said she felt like she was being treated differently from everyone else, and that story has strangely really stayed with me.
This is a difficult matter to describe, but at a party or something like that, people with similar backgrounds are more likely to have a good time talking together, while people with different backgrounds can end up just being a kind of noise. This is the same at a workshop. Putting together an event aimed at people from overseas, with people who have backgrounds and positions that differ from your own, is actually very hard. It greatly increases the stuff you have to think about and running the workshop becomes complex.
But when this is a place to make something, the meaning of that difficulty changes. In a creative environment, “noise” becomes an alternative perspective. There is a dimension to it that improves a work, so that difficulty feels interesting. When the student told me that story, it instilled in me a renewed sense of the potential for the creative collaboration that we are trying to do. Opportunities for people with various perspectives to be proactively involved are necessary for society, but I also have a strong awareness in a more limited sense that such forums are essential for interesting works of art to appear.
Q. Watching the three films that the participants made, the viewer is filled with a sense of the strong fellowship in Japan that might lead society to exclude outsiders, and the issue of public space in which people are not allowed simply to be in the space. Given your experiences in Brazil, what do cities in Japan feel like to you?
Yes, the street culture in Brazil was quite a shock. Compared to that, Japanese street culture is indeed a bit of a letdown. On the other hand, there is also another problem in Brazil with the many homeless people who have been exploited and have nowhere to go. In that sense, I don’t think that Brazil is absolutely better per se.
More than anything, though, in Brazil I had a sense that individuals change the urban community. The individual seems weak in Japan but I also don’t think we should despair about that just yet. Artistic activities by foreign-born people in Japan can be an impetus to change that situation.
Though not directly related to KINO Meeting, I have moved to Kochi because I wanted to get involved with the Japanese government’s system of foreign technical intern trainees, something in which I long had an interest. A community revitalization group in the city of Tosa, Kochi, has made it their mission to promote exchange between the trainees and local residents, and I wanted to be involved with that.
Like collaborative filmmaking, this kind of exchange might help usher in the kind of street culture to which I aspire, even if only on a small scale. Modest though they are, those are my expectations for these efforts.
A Crew Community That Transcends Geography
Q. Finally, what are your future plans for KINO Meeting?
Something did not go so well with the previous workshop and that was how we positioned the city or community. We wanted to focus on that thematically and so we brought together people with some kind of feeling of attachment to Ikebukuro, but those feelings varied considerably among the participants. In fact, it felt like we confused the participants by making it about the urban community from the get-go. Someone said that the community would have appeared naturally in the films even without us intentionally specifying it from the start. The current challenge we face is how to deal with that.
In terms of the project overall, the workshop took place in Ikebukuro due to various circumstances like venue availability, but moving forward, I would like to change the project so that the fieldwork location and content of the workshop are more closely related, and each finished work differs depending on the place.
Also, I’m thinking about the community of the crew. We were fortunate with the Ikebukuro participants that some of them want to stay involved with the project in the future, so I now want to consider the best way for them to do that in terms of their position on the team and involvement in the planning.
Q. It would surely be a lot of fun if different kinds of participants came together and formed a caravan that transcends geography.
Absolutely. Ultimately, I hope we can hold workshops in a wide range of areas.
If we are able to build a collaborative mode of production that interacts with communities in various places and, as a result, staddles the members of a community, we might then be able to make a film. In that sense, I want to continue thinking about the possibilities for workshop programs in which the participants are proactively involved in running the events, and for new and interesting works made by people with all kinds of backgrounds.
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Abe Kota
Designer; Director, Pantanal
Born in 1986, Abe Kota worked at Hiromura Design Office before turning freelance in 2018 to pursue activities guided by design and cultural anthropology. From 2018 to 2019, he was based in São Paulo, where he organized various projects related to local street culture. In 2021, he released the film Whose city is it?. Alongside his main work as a graphic designer, he is also involved recently in research and art projects. In March 2022, Abe moved to Tosa in Kochi, where he is developing the Wakusei Project that aims to promote exchange between local residents and foreign technical intern trainees. Also from 2022, Abe has partnered with Tokyo Artpoint Project for KINO Meeting, which runs filmmaking workshops with foreign-born people in Japan.
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Interview and text: Sugihara Tamaki
Editing: Nagamine Mika
Photographs: Maeda Mitsu
Translation: William Andrews
