Berlinale 2024: The Cats of Gokogu Shrine (Forum) | Interview of Kazuhiro Soda
In an enlightening exploration of nature’s harmony and humanity’s role within it, award-winning Japanese filmmaker Kazuhiro Soda discusses his captivating documentary The Cats of Gokugo Shrine, urging viewers to contemplate life’s interconnectedness.
The 119-minute Japanese observational documentary, The Cats of Gokugo Shrine (Gokogu no Neko), appeals to you to question your life and the attitudes of human beings.
Kazuhiro Soda, a Japanese documentary filmmaker, opens up about living in nature after experiencing a very linear lifestyle, always thinking he needed to progress and that he could do better. “We chase after more money, more power, but we are using up all the natural resources and facing a crisis of extinction. In New York, I was living this life, but I thought it was time for me to return to my roots. We wanted to change our way of life.”
Soda has shot most of his films in Japan, although he lived in New York. But because of the pandemic, Soda started questioning living against nature. “I thought I should live a life that goes along with nature.”
Living against nature, in nature, everything is circular—seasons, the sun—and this is what made him return to living in a small island village, Shimado, in Japan.
“Cats are plentiful in Shimado, and we became friends with them. We saw two of our friends needed our help and we asked for the help of the local cat activist. He was involved in trap, neuter, and release (TNR) program for cats. My wife helped him. I casually started filming without thinking about it. When I was filming at the Gokugo Shrine, I realized it was indeed an interesting place where many people came for different reasons. Some came for gardening, to clean the place, some to feed the cats, and some for photographing the cats. It was a strange, fascinating public space. I became interested in the relationship between cats and humans. Street cats are part of nature, and yet they need humans’ help to survive. They are in this ambiguous grey zone. They are frontiers of nature. If we observe and depict how cats are living, you always see human society, and by observing the cat, you are also observing human society.”
Soda ended up shooting the cats in the shrine for a year. He said, “It is like a microcosm, but I felt if you dig deeper, deep enough, you often find a structure of a larger world, in a universal structure.” During the filming, he learned very interesting lessons. For example, male cats are always fighting and very territorial, and we always want to extend their territory. “It’s like men in terms of history. It’s always men who start the war. Look at human history; we find that men were always at the forefront of starting wars,” said Soda.
“I filmed around 30 cats, but over time, we have 15 cats, as they have a short lifespan and because of TNR, we don’t have babies anymore, thus we will have fewer cats. The community on the island is divided over the cats and has become a sensitive issue, which led to cat lovers coming to a compromise to agree to the TNR and care for the cats that remain,” added Soda, a Peabody Award-winning filmmaker and also a recipient of the Marek Nowicki Lifetime Achievement Prize awarded by the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. “I want my films to be something to connect nature with people, and it is a genuine feeling when it comes to filming people in the natural way of life.”
Soda calls himself a painter, an artist where the digital revolution, which had helped him.
Soda spent most of his time in New York working for NHK, but while working on TV shows, he was frustrated, though he enjoyed it initially, with the way the TV shows were made. “I did not really like it; you only shoot what you already know. You take bits and pieces of reality to fit your story, and you cannot make any discoveries. I wanted to throw away research, scripts, and just roll the camera and just make a film according to the discoveries made during the shooting.”
While Soda waits for another ‘encounter’ to find his next film subject, he enjoys living in Ushimado, a town located by the sea.
