Katharine Round

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.