Gama

A storyteller of peace serves as a guide in the “Gama”— natural caves where many local people lost their lives during the Battle of Okinawa. The woman in blue standing by his side represents the intersection of the present and the past.

The day blinds then slowly retires, leaving a woman facing the sea on the threshold of light and dark. Slowly zooming out, Kaori Oda takes us into the caves and the past that Gama recounts. After the sinkholes of Mexico (Cenote, 2020), the artist, a former student of Béla Tarr’s film.factory, investigates other underground spaces, this time in the Okinawa archipelago in southern Japan, the cradle of a Japanese culture scarred by World War II and the still present US military. In the 16mm static shots, Mitsuo Matsunaga, storyteller and guide, shares the stories linked to some of these refuges, stories of escapes, raids, hunger and thirst, of those that died without graves, survival and mutual assistance. Eighty-three of the hundred and forty civilians who found refuge in the Chibichirigama cave, realising that their bamboo spears were powerless against machine guns and fearing an imminent death at the hand of the American soldiers, committed mass suicide on 2nd April 1945. The guide regularly invites us to share this terrifying ordeal by proposing a “dark experience”: remaining in pitch black darkness is the only way to discern the light indicating the way out. Sometimes a ghost, sometimes a witness, and gradually becoming the depositary of the history she is being told, dancer and choreographer Nao Yoshigai follows him closely around these obscure crevices. This sheds light on the condition of her contemporaries, who are asked to find their way in the obscurity of the wars that continue to rage. 

Antoine Thirion