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Katharine Round


Artist & Filmmaker


CONTENTS

    - The Divide
    - Dearborn, Michigan
    - Ghost Town
    - Climate Symphony
    - Flatline
    - If The Oceans Could Speak
    - Oil Coal and Gas for Three Cellos
    - Twelve Thousand Years in Fragments
    - Two Rooms 



ABOUT

I make award-winning non-fiction films that are seen in cinemas, television, art galleries, online, and on the street. I’ve had support from the Arts Council, BFI, Creative Europe, Forma Arts, CPH:LAB, Dartmouth Films, Passion Pictures, the Guardian, Serpentine Galleries and many others.

My work is driven by a deep curiosity towards "ordinary" human beings: our contradictions, humanity and fallibility as we attempt to make sense of the world.

I often explore specific situations that illuminate wider thematic ideas, with formalist intervention to “provoke reality” and uncover new ways of seeing our lives. I don’t hide my presence and aim to question myself as much as I do others, and as such, I acknowledge a vision of the world through "imperfect" eyes: a cinema of lies as much as of truth. 

This site acts as a notepad for past and ongoing work, I aim to share my evolving thought processes as well as the results.

My work is produced via Disobedient Films.


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CONTACT
Disobedient Films
10-28 Millers Avenue
London E8 2DS
For Sales Enquiries: info [@] disobedientfilms.com
To email me: katharineround [@] gmail dot com



Home


Fifteen years after the 2011 tsunami, taxi drivers in the Japanese port town of Kamaishi began picking up passengers who didn’t exist. Using rigged cameras, the taxi is transformed into a moving confession booth. Over the course of one night, a series of conversations between drivers and their passengers reveal how those who survived live with the dead.

A driver dreams of a white horse; another swears the phone box is full of ghosts trying to get through. Some passengers recall premonitions that saved their lives, others talk of the ordinary ache of living on. The car drifts through the night, headlights sweeping empty streets where deer watch like sentinels. Back at the depot, a driver checks the horse-racing listings, while a phone box rings unanswered in the darkness.

Between silence and conversation, myth and memory, Ghost Town inhabits a liminal space between documentary and dream. It reveals a community suspended between the visible and invisible - a portrait of life lived alongside its ghosts.



Director's note 

A few years ago a newspaper article caught my eye: in the north-eastern reaches of Japan, taxi drivers were picking up passengers that turned out not to exist. Almost fifteen years after the tsunami, it seemed the dead had found a place amongst the living. A friend of mine had recently, and suddenly, passed away and the idea captured me as I grappled with my own loss.

I tend to believe it is the quieter, more reluctant voice that often has the most to say, so the idea of “shared encounter” became crucial. I wanted to see how film could open a space for stories of loss, memory, and imagination that might otherwise remain unspoken - a kind of slow haunting, where grief and the everyday intermingle. I also wanted to create something that could embrace an expanded sense of reality - a world where ghosts and spirits simply are. 

The local taxi firm became a kind of mobile confession booth. We rigged a cab with cameras and invited residents to take a ride, sharing whatever was on their mind as the city passed by: a phone box filled with spirits, deer in the gardens, a gambling addiction, a karaoke song, dreams, regrets, and fragments of ordinary life sparked by the view from the car window. The conversations were completely spontaneous and that mattered. They created a space that felt magical and the film unfolds as its own dreamworld - somewhere between memory and imagination - where stories drift and intertwine like shadows on the road. 

Filmed mostly at night, the taxi’s  moving theatre allowed different planes of reality - past and present, living and dead - to coexist. Where the unconscious is as real as what’s in front of your eyes. One passenger says “I don’t dream when I’m sleeping, I only dream when I’m awake” - and in the face of horror, that sense of contemplation is what was most beautiful for me. 

Credits

Featuring:
Drivers: Toru Konno, Yoshiji Iwasaki, Fumio Goto, Masaaki Koike
Passengers: Pastor Yusuke Yanagiya, Nodoka Kikuchi, Akiko Iwasaki, Shiho Dobashi, Sueko Kawarada, Shinichi Kuwahata 
The Taxi Controller: Yoichi Matsuda
The Visitor: Shiori Ito

Director: Katharine Round
Producers: Katharine Round, Laura Shacham, Shiori Ito
Researcher: Shiho Dobashi
Cinematography: Jamie Quantrill
Editors: John Mister, Katharine Round
Sound Design: Simon Panayi
Translation: Takatsuna Mukai
Trailer Editor: Edouard Tissot
Additional Sound (Trailer): Jamie Perera
Artwork: Caspar Newbolt, Izzy Roth-Dishy (Version Industries)

Screenings

World Premiere — Visions du Réel, 2026 (in competition)
Additional festival screenings to be announced.

Press & Reviews

“an inspired exploration of the myriad ways humans process loss and grief…a haunting cinematic confessional on wheels.” - Slant Magazine (three to watch at Visions du Réel)

“a cinematic séance unfolding on the margins of reality” - Screen Anarchy

"intimate... lyrical” - Business Doc Europe

★★★★ “this poetic elegy... beautifully examined” - International Cinephile Society

★★★★ ‘With their heads resting on the delicate lace of Japanese taxis, people confide in each other about anything and everything...” - Le Polyester

Audience Responses

“Unlike other films I've seen in the best possible ways… Your film was in my head for days”

"I didn’t want this film to end. I loved everything about it...”

"The best conversational documentary I've ever seen."

“Dreamlike, profound, exposed…”

“An extraordinary film, understated & yet profound. Beautiful piece of work”

Please contact info@disobedientfilms.com for sales and screening inquiries. 
Running on Cargo