'Se'-back (2022)

Gozo Yoshimasu is one of Japan's leading contemporary poets, still wildly prolific into his ninth decade. This film documents his 2019 performance of Se ("Back"), a live poetry reading set against accompaniment from avant-garde rock group Kukangendai. Filmed at Soto, an intimate live music space in Kyoto, Yoshimasu performs a poem dedicated to the view from a window, a world beyond a single pane of glass. Earlier that summer, Yoshimasu had spent several weeks in a small hotel room overlooking the same sea from which sprung the devastating tsunami of 2011. During his time there, he composed poems on the room's window while gazing out at-though without ever setting foot upon-the spiritual island of Mt. Kinka. Blindfolded and wearing a facemask, Yoshimasu plays audio recordings, growls and rasps his way through a rendition of a poem he wrote in Ishinomaki, and channels his every ounce of energy into drawing, using a pane of glass as his canvas. Kukangendai sculpt shapes of sound in response: an entire universe thrown into sharp relief by an uncompromising contest between voice and sound.