Ring Wandering

Director's Note

I was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan's capital. During the 2020 Olympics construction boom, Tokyo transformed with more buildings and concrete than ever before, as if the city's past had also been repeatedly covered over. It’s believed that over 100,000 lives lost in the 1945 Tokyo Bombings still linger underground. Japan's late 19th-century modernization, aiming to rival the West, significantly impacted its long-lasting healthy ecosystem, leading to the extinction of the Japanese wolf, once the alpha predator. Today, as global conflicts escalate and wars are happening again, our society progresses, often ignoring the past. Yet, I think the memories of the past are not something that would easily disappear, but are layered beneath the land, one upon another, not be obscured. Living in the fast-paced 2020s, where values shift and many things are consumed, replaced, and forgotten so rapidly, I sought to capture intangible entities like the land's memories and what once existed there in the form of narrative film. The extinct Japanese wolf symbolizes what's disappeared from the sight of Japanese society. In the film, our protagonist Sosuke unearths a relic in modern Tokyo, transporting him to the world of the people who once lived on the same land, teaching him a value of life. Through this journey, I hope it gives you a moment to pause and reflect, even briefly, on lives and memories buried somewhere in the world.