Japanese director Shuntaro Uchida discusses Incinerator, adapting Kaori Ekuni’s story into what he describes as “less an adaptation than an extension of a feeling.”
Japanese director Shuntaro Uchida is in Karlovy Vary for the first time, and he is amazed and also surprised by the audience reaction to his film, Incinerator (Shokyakuro), which had its world premiere at Karlovy Vary in the Proxima Competition. It follows ten-year-old Kozue, who spends her days feeding the school incinerator with things she wants gone and, without quite knowing it, begins falling for a university student in a passage toward adulthood so hushed it barely announces itself. Produced by Que Lindo and Neopa, the company behind Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Evil Does Not Exist, the film marks director Shuntaro Uchida’s return to the material of his own boyhood, filtered through Kaori Ekuni’s short story of the same name. There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a film when it trusts a child to carry it.
Writer Kaori Ekuni’s original story runs to barely twenty pages. Asked what convinced him it could sustain a feature, Uchida credited his producer, Nagao, with something harder to name than plot. “It was Mr. Nagao’s ability to make the story feel like it wasn’t written,” he said, not a synopsis so much as a current, “the flow of imagination, non-stop.” It was that unwritten quality, he suggested, that permitted him to expand it: less an adaptation than an extension of a feeling already fully formed on the page.
That trust extended to Ekuni herself, who gave Uchida the material with what he described as total freedom. “She would always say, ‘Please do it with all your heart,'” he recalled, and then stayed away until the film was finished. Their first meeting after the film was made left him more nervous, he admitted, than almost anything in the production itself. “I hadn’t met her for a long time. I was really nervous when I met her for the first time.” Her response, when it came, was warm enough to undo the anxiety completely. “She gave me a lot of compliments. It was such a huge relief.”
Geographically, Incinerator refuses the Tokyo of postcards. The production shot in Tokyo proper but set its emotional centre an hour outside, in an elementary school in Chiba, a choice he made with Nagao after scouting locations that could stand in for the director’s own childhood. “It was not really like central Tokyo,” he said, “but more like a local town where you could really feel the human activity.” The film’s Tokyo, in other words, is not the fast-paced skyline most audiences import into the world; it’s something closer to the town he grew up in, reassembled.
The closeness between Kozue’s story and Shuntaro Uchida’s own is not incidental. “So many experiences that I had as a child are depicted in the film,” he said, describing a childhood shadowed by ordinary dread, injections, swimming lessons, and being made to sing alone in front of classmates. “I was a boy who was afraid of having an injection in school and going to the swimming pool. Sometimes you have to sing alone in front of many other students.” It’s a small, specific catalogue of fears, and it maps almost exactly onto the anxieties his director’s statement names outright, such as the sense, as a child, of being alone in a difficulty everyone else seemed to move through easily.
Some of the film’s most striking imagery—a long shadow-puppet sequence, built up from an idea that started small and grew in the editing room—didn’t come from a single source. “We used many people’s ideas to create the scene,” Uchida said, naming the sound and lighting technicians as co-authors of a passage that, in Ekuni’s original story, barely exists. “It was quite short, but it was very important for me, so we decided to have this scene quite long in the film.”
Light and shadow, he said, aren’t simply visual motifs in Incinerator; they’re close to the film’s actual subject. “I wanted to show the natural colours and light of Japan that everyone remembers,” he explained, “and I also wanted to show the shadow play… I tried to make the shadows look like a silhouette that can bring many of us back to childhood.” The sound design works in the same territory in a different register: cicadas and the drone of a passing motorcycle, layered by sound technician Matsuno to mark the film’s sense of passing time. “These layers of sound create the sense of time,” he said, as a way of letting the audience feel duration rather than simply watch it.
Incinerator is set in 1995, a choice that carries more weight than nostalgia alone. Kozue’s father moves through the film depressed, in a decade when, as Shuntaro put it, “the word ‘depression’ was almost non-existent” in everyday Japanese life. People tried to just make you feel like nothing is happening. You can just go for it.” The character wasn’t modelled on Uchida’s own family, he clarified, but on a friend. “It’s not a role model, but somebody among my friends… who has an alcohol problem. So, he was like a model for this father.” What interested him wasn’t the specifics of the addiction but its familiarity. “Having an alcoholic father or mother can also be a very universal problem. This can happen in every country,” and, more than that, what it looks like refracted through a child’s limited understanding, watching without the vocabulary to name what she’s watching.
Pressed on whether the film was gesturing toward the language of social realism—the alcoholism, the strained household economy set against its own visibly poetic form—he resisted the framing of opposites. The subject matter, he agreed, sits close to social reality; the form he chose for it is deliberately slow, deliberately close to poetry. He didn’t describe the two as counterpoints so much as a single method: telling a hard thing gently, without flattening it.
Death moves through the film in the same undeclared way. The director traced it back to losing his grandfather as a child, an experience he says he still hasn’t fully processed. “I have lived without being able to understand death. That’s another theme of this film.” First love gets the same treatment, deliberately unresolved. “I don’t know if it’s love or like,” he said of Kozue’s feelings for the university student. “It’s something that I don’t understand,” and he was careful to note that the ambiguity wasn’t about gender. “I didn’t want to depict the female side of the story. I wanted to depict the childish side of the story. Everyone should have experienced it.”
The performance at the centre of the film belongs to a young, non-professional actress with some background in musical theatre but no formal training. Shuntaro was blunt about what he was looking for in the audition process: not polish, but presence. “I wanted her to stand in front of the camera. That’s why I chose her.” Once cast, he says he deliberately avoided over-directing her. “I didn’t want to ruin her image. I wanted her to be herself.” What emerged, in his account, was closer to observation than performance—a young actress who had read the script closely enough and thought about her character carefully enough that her preparation looked, on screen, like instinct. “She prepared a lot. It was not really a coincidence that she was such a match for the protagonist.”
Karlovy Vary was the director’s first experience of an international festival, and he described the audience’s response with something close to disbelief. When the film ended on a black screen and his name appeared, the applause caught him off guard. “If it were a Japanese audience, they would have watched the film until the end. Then they would have applauded,” he said, but the wave of response, breaking again as the credits rolled, read to him as something more physical than ceremonial. “It felt like people, audiences, were hugging me. It was a really beautiful moment.”
Whether Incinerator finds an audience at home remains, in his words, an open question; Japan’s arthouse circuit is narrow, and he’s candid about not knowing how a slow, interior film about a ten-year-old will land there. But he left Karlovy Vary already turning the festival itself into material. “Visiting this festival, talking to many people like you, really gave me a lot of time to think,” he said. “This could probably lead me to a new film.” For a director whose entire aesthetic is built on paying attention to what almost slips past unnoticed, it seemed a fitting note to end on.
The 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival runs from July 3 to 11, 2026.
