INTERVIEW

Interview with naoto iina, Producer and Selection Committee Member of Dance and Media Japan's (DMJ) International Dance Film Festival (IDFF).

 
Interviewer: Mizuhito Kuroda
Date:OCT 2025
 
 

Q1. Can you tell me how DMJ has been selecting works for the International Dance Film Festival to date?

 
We select and screen dance films from around the world based purely on the strength of the work, irrespective of the filmmaker’s background, history of screening work, nationality, budget, or level of recognition. Most dance films tend to be short—typically one to twenty minutes long—and many are experimental pieces that weave together images and concepts. Even among similar dance film festivals around the world, I believe we’ve consistently selected films that offer compelling insights into the relationship between dance and film.
 
 
 

Q2. A new documentary category has introduced this year, what was the reasoning behind it?

 
One of the most rewarding aspects of the International Dance Film Festival is the opportunity to encounter a wide range of bodies and landscapes from around the world. By adding a documentary category, we wanted to see even more real people and real environments. We also felt that the short fiction works that have been our main focus until now were beginning to fall into familiar patterns, and it seemed like the right moment to rethink our approach to dance film.
I believe that documentary filmmaking techniques naturally blend with the aesthetics of dance film as a way of capturing dance on screen. While stage recordings are valuable for dance archives, they are ultimately just that—records of performances. What we aim to feature at our festival are works shaped by directorial choices through filming and editing, or pieces that reflect the filmmaker’s unique perspective. As an international dance film festival, we want to explore the notions of subjectivity and otherness in moving images, and this new documentary category is a step in that direction.
 
 
 

Q3. When you speak of documentaries, are you referring to recordings of events that occurred in reality? In a genre such as dance, where live performance holds such a strong presence, what value or characteristics does a documentary dance film possess?

 
For example, Chantal Akerman's One day Pina asked… is a documentary that captures behind-the-scenes moments of Pina Bausch’s company Tanztheater Wuppertal. The opening narration says something to the effect of “the footage here appears in the order it was shot, without editing”, and the film carefully weaves together backstage scenes with shots from performances. Midway through the film Akerman herself speaks about her impressions of Pina Bausch. What is striking is that Pina Bausch appears only in the final minute or so. It is in this restraint that the director’s gaze becomes apparent.
That same gaze can be felt in From the East (1993), in which Akerman documents the people and landscapes of places such as Poland and Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She never attempts to enter these scenes, always recording from the perspective of an outsider. This is the visual direction of the filmmaker; filming the existing landscape without interviewing the people as a way of recording reality itself. I believe this an essential function of film.
Another example is Swiss film director Daniel Schmidt's The Written Face (1995), a documentary about the Japanese art of onnagata [male actors who play female roles]. It focuses primarily on Tamasaburo Bando, and the opening scene alternates between shots of him performing on stage as onnagata with scenes of him walking around offstage unadorned. The contrast between the onstage and offstage selves, man and woman, reality and illusion, forms the central question of the work. A fictional love story with a geisha is introduced part way through, blurring the line between documentary and fiction. And scenes of Kazuo Ohno performing butoh appear without any explanation. Every image is strikingly beautiful, and the gaze of a foreign director observing Japan's fantastical landscape heightens the purity of the film. The cinematography by Renato Berta is likewise never intrusive or showy.
 
 
 

Q4. I see, so documentary films involve viewing subjects through the perspective of the director or cinematographer.
Finally, what is the significance of the keywords “actuality” and “incident” in this context?
 

There was once a student graduation project made by members of an underground idol group. The film, shot by the members themselves, was intended to document their debut live performance. At first, it captured their efforts and preparations leading up to the debut, but midway through production it came to light that one of the members had entered a romantic relationship with a fan. She later became pregnant and left the group—an incident that even made online news at the time. In the idol world, romantic relationships are still often forbidden, and forming personal ties with fans remains taboo. What had begun as a documentary following their journey to debut ended up recording their farewell concert instead. The final scenes show them singing and dancing through tears. For those involved, this kind of work carries deeply mixed emotions, but as a film, it stands as a valuable document that captured both “actuality” and “incident”.
 
What Akerman’s portrait of Pina, Schmidt’s depiction of Tamasaburo Bando, and this documentary about the idol group's breakup all have in common is that they are not promotional commercial films for dancers. Documentaries about dancers and dance companies often tend to become promotional in nature. However, true documentary films must always pose questions and raise issues; they are not simply success stories. The filmmaker's own interests and conflicts must be present, recorded through the camera. And although the dancers are the subjects, what is ultimately depicted are the events behind them, and within those unfolding events lies something essential about the nature of human existence itself.