In connection to Between Fantasy and the Everyday, upcoming at e-flux Screening Room on June 15, 2026, Film Notes publishes a conversation between Utako Koguchi and Cici Peng. Born in 1961, Koguchi is a key figure in 1980s and ’90s feminist and queer experimental film in Japan. Her work blends surreal performances and freewheeling experiments in form with a distinct focus on girlhood. Koguchi’s films O-DE-KA-KE Diary (1988) and Ophelia’s Favorite Book 3 (1995) have recently been translated and subtitled by Mia Parnall, and will be shown with English subtitles for the first time at e-flux Screening Room.
Cici Peng: Can you talk a bit about how you got into filmmaking?
Utako Koguchi: From the time I was in elementary school, I was the kind of girl who loved watching films, as well as arts and crafts, reading and drawing girls’ manga, creative dance, and sports. In 1980, during the heyday of new subcultures, I entered the Department of Theatre Arts in the School of Letters at Waseda University, where I studied film theory, film history, theater, classical performing arts, and other subjects.
At the time, there were more than one hundred film and theater clubs crowded together on campus. There were also cinemas nearby that screened both mainstream and experimental films, and I often went to see double or triple features, as well as all-night programs. After visiting clubs devoted to writing, dance, songwriting, and other activities, I joined a filmmaking club with the storyboard for Rain, my first film, in hand. With the help of senior members, I directed and produced Rain on 8mm.
It was also a time when independent student films were being actively made at other general universities. I attended screenings held by various universities, and through those exchanges, I took part in many independent films as an actor and crew member and eventually began organizing screenings myself. After Rain was selected for a festival, I was invited, while still a student, to serve as a selection member for the Pia Film Festival, where I watched nearly nine hundred independent films in a year. For the following quarter century, I continued watching independent films as a preselector for the same festival. Incidentally, my university graduation thesis was on Japanese independent cinema.
CP: Why did you lean into more diaristic practices? Particularly in O-DE-KA-KE Diary I?
UK: When I participated as both a crew member and actor in an independent production called Ai no 2-chome 3-banchi (1986), I encountered the freewheeling filmmaking method of director Katsuyuki Hirano, which inspired me a lot. Hirano adapted an original manga by Katsuhiro Otomo into a film using his own distinctive style.
The story revolves around a young man and woman who become a couple amid a conflict between a group of gay men and a group of unhoused people. The performers were asked to improvise their performances, gradually weaving together the characters and the story. Since the entire city served as the stage, documentary-like elements also entered the film, creating a strange world in which fiction and reality mixed together. I played the role of a mysterious unhoused woman. I mingled with a group of unhoused people who used a school swimming pool at night as a substitute bath, and swam around underwater like a mermaid.
O-DE-KA-KE Diary I began as a spin-off centered on the character of the unhoused woman. The production took more than a year. I bought a Canon 1014XL, an 8mm camera capable of synchronous sound recording. Whenever I felt like shooting, I would call an acquaintance and ask them to help film the next day. Wearing the woman’s tattered costume, I would become an innocent, stray-cat-like character and go “out” barefoot to various places, recording my own actions and the reactions of those around me. There was no script. When I wandered barefoot through the streets of a busy downtown district and stepped on a shard of glass, injuring myself terribly, I immediately headed to a nearby garbage dump and filmed myself crouching there like a cat.
Another time, while I was resting in the cargo bed of a long-distance truck parked in the lot of a mountainside restaurant, the truck departed without me realizing it. It got onto the expressway and carried me all the way to the regional city of Osaka. This incident caused the story to take a dramatic leap forward. The subjective shots were filmed by myself, while the objective shots were filmed by friends I had asked to help.
The plot slowly developed: a woman runs away from home and wanders through the city. Swept along by circumstances, she embarks on an unexpected journey. At the summit of a mountain, she encounters the sun and loses her life. Watched over by her own soul, her corpse drifts down a river and returns to the city center. Her soul returns home, but there is no longer any place for her there. She follows her corpse as it heads toward the sea, merges with it, and is revived ...
This flow of the story gradually matured and took shape through repeated performances and filming. While filming, I reminded myself to abandon reason and follow physical instinct. Sometimes I was the only person on location; at most, there were three of us: myself, a camera operator, and an assistant. More than twenty people in total took part as camera operators on different days. Many of them were video artists or filmmakers.
CP: Performance features in your work as an important practice. You consistently put yourself on screen throughout your own works, and we also see your grandmother’s performance in The Sleeping Flower (1991). How do you see the relationship between filmmaking and performance in your work? And how do you approach performance?
UK: When I suddenly think of an image, or daydream one, and want to give it form as quickly as possible, the fastest way to materialize that image is to perform it myself. Unless the time from conception to performance to filming is kept as short as possible, the feeling of excitement I have toward the expression will not last.
In O-DE-KA-KE Diary I, rather than simply documenting a performance, I experimented with a form of moving-image expression borne from the conspiratorial relationship between myself as the subject and the person filming me.
For the scenes in A Dandelion [Rosaceae] (1990) in which I appear, I was filmed by my mentor, the poet and filmmaker Shiroyasu Suzuki. In a scene where life-sized human performers play twin dolls, I performed both roles, first playing Lulu while the left half of the frame was masked off, then rewinding the film and playing Lala while the right half was masked off. Professor Shiroyasu filmed this with a 16mm Bolex film camera, creating an optical composite in real time.
My grandmother in The Sleeping Flower was playing at making a film with me, her granddaughter and the person filming her. It was also something like a dialogue through the camera. My grandmother also appeared in Ophelia’s Favorite Book 3. Unlike her everyday life, which she often spent quietly and modestly on her own, she enjoyed the extraordinary experience of being surrounded by a filmmaking crew and performing in a fiction. Later, when she was hospitalized, she happily told the nurses that she had once been an actress.
Through performance, I am conscious of creating a sense of dissonance, so that something remains an extension of reality while also becoming something stranger than reality. Through that dissonance, I hope to provoke both expected and unexpected reactions from the surrounding world. Creating moving-image works through performances staged in the world of everyday life is like a kind of magic that transforms dull reality into fantasy.
CP: While reading about and watching experimental films by women in the 1990s in Japan, I noticed that many filmmakers turned away from the abstract structuralism that came before and invested more into performance and the body. Can you speak about the general key themes of women’s filmmaking during that period and your own work within this movement?
UK: I started making films in 1980. Thinking about the works of Japanese experimental filmmakers before that, there may indeed have been a strong structuralist tendency. Also, while it may be true that many women’s films after 1990 focused on performance and physical expression, I don’t know for sure.
I feel that between these two generations, filmmaking shifted to an approach that relied on personal values and sensibilities that are distinct from broader perspectives or concepts. In other words, female filmmakers who didn’t find reality in the masculine, broader approach began to express themselves through a more personal, physical approach. Perhaps there’s nothing that feels more truly “yours” than your own body.
When I first went to university, student filmmaking was thriving, but there were only a few female filmmakers. The films made by the male students were mostly genre films, and I felt that they lacked a certain freedom of expression. I also saw many so-called experimental films around that time, but they didn’t really resonate with me either. However, I felt a connection to the expressions and ideas of the surrealists, beyond film. I felt that film could depict a visceral sense of reality that transcends reality itself.
CP: Your films seem particularly concerned with the perception and potentials of girlhood, from O-DE-KA-KE Diary I to the dolls of A Dandelion [Rosaceae] and quite prominently in Ophelia’s Favorite Books, which centers various Taishō- and Shōwa-era (1912–89) women writers and their deliberations around the definitions of shōjo (“girl”). What drew you to the subject matter, and why did you explore it through both contemporary and historical lenses?
UK: I believe that girlhood contains something like a spiritual sanctuary, something that seems destined to be lost once one becomes an adult woman. This sanctuary is limited in time and closed off, yet at the same time it is also a world of imagination: sublime like myth, infinitely transgressive, and freely expansive. It is there that I find possibility and fascination.
I place both contemporary and historical perspectives at the center of the work. From the Taishō period through the Shōwa period, women’s liberation was proclaimed in Japan, yet ordinary women may still have been little more than birds in a cage. Even contemporary women, who are supposed to be enjoying freedom, may still be bound by invisible constraints. I would like to believe that, in every era, girlhood—before the onset of full socialization—is permitted to immerse itself in a protected inner world.
CP: Your work has been included in feminist film programs, and I was also struck to see that one of your films screened in the 1997 LUX London program “The First International Transgender Film and Video Festival.” I’m curious how you think about the different critical or curatorial frameworks through which your work has been received.
UK: I was very honored that the visuals of A Dandelion [Rosaceae] were used for the main poster and brochure of the First International Transgender Film and Video Festival. Now, I feel it’s a miracle that a modest independent film made forty years ago is still being rediscovered by a new generation of curators and given the opportunity to be seen by unexpected audiences.
Because much of my work is borderless, the fact that it ended up being included in diverse categories, which led to more opportunities for screening, is a good thing. In Japan, my work has often been included in programs such as “Girls’ Film” showcases. I actually found it amusing that such an uncanny work could be introduced as a “girls’ film.”
CP: In both O-DE-KA-KE Diary and Ophelia’s Favorite Books, the river and water feature as returning elements of the urban topography, transforming the space into something more magical and oneiric. Can you speak about this return to this watery space?
UK: The human body is 75 percent water as an infant and 60 percent water as an adult, and water is indispensable to human life. The seas that cover the Earth, itself a living organism, and the rivers that circulate through it seem almost like blood vessels or lymphatic vessels. I feel a physiological affinity with water. When I am enveloped by the sound of rain inside the house, or when raindrops that have begun to fall outside touch my skin, I am reminded that I am alive.
According to evolutionary theory, human beings descended from apes, and, in the distant past, from fish; it is also said that the human fetus retains traces of something resembling fish gills. It seems that I am not the only one who feels nostalgia for water.
I imagined Ophelia, who lost her life by the river, as a symbol of eternal, sacred girlhood, and dreamed that beneath the water’s surface there spreads an inverted world of gender.
CP: In 2014, you founded “The Poetry of Finless Porpoises/sunameri no uta” project with young filmmakers, students, and local citizens in Ōmura in Nagasaki, where you produced nine short films that were screened at various film festivals. Could you talk a bit about your work with younger filmmakers and how you organized this project?
UK: After encountering a group of retired elders working together in a seemingly utopian satoyama village, I launched an omnibus short film project under the banner of “satoyama-ism.” The aim was to create a structure that would bring young people to Ōmura and foster collaboration across generations and communities.
Ōmura is shaped by many layers of history: the atomic bombing, the presence of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces, the persecution of hidden Christians, and Ōmura Bay, which is home to hundreds of finless porpoises, the world’s smallest whales. On the surface, the project sought to rediscover Ōmura’s charms through the perspectives of local citizens and young people from outside the area, connecting moving images, local wisdom, and youthful creativity. Beneath this concept, however, were many hidden themes.
Following preliminary workshops, we invited nine young directors and around fifty students from Tokyo. During the main production in summer 2014, bases were established across Ōmura—in shopping streets, old town districts, schools, mountain villages, and coastal areas. In total, some 2,800 people of all ages, many of them strangers to one another, took part in what became a miraculous collaborative production.
What was most distinctive was that the project was based on “satoyama-ism”: an exchange of intangible values rather than money. Instead of purchasing everything as in commercial filmmaking, we borrowed unused spaces, received imperfect vegetables from farmers, were fed by local mothers, and relied on volunteers’ cars for transportation. Gratitude and reciprocity became the driving force of the creative process.
It was a miraculous project.
