A year ago, I heard that in the north eastern reaches of Japan, taxi drivers were picking up passengers that turned-out to be non-existent - ghosts or imaginings, perhaps due to the grief felt almost a decade on from the tsunami. Regardless of the reason, no one wants to talk openly about it.  A Japanese Ghost Story is an inquiry into memory, myth, life and death using fixed cameras in the taxi cabs of the small port town of Kamaishi. Three drivers, Toru, Goto and Chikako, weave their way through the streets picking up occasional passengers and conversing with an unseen stranger about their lives.

Image: Keith, still from The Divide

Around the same time I received a letter from Keith, one of the participants in my previous film, The Divide. Keith is nearing the end of a 30 year sentence for a minor drugs offence, imprisoned in the Texan desert in 1996 as part of the US’ “three strikes” law. I had continued writing to him after our initial meeting in the film. Keith’s letter delivered an additional blow I wasn’t expecting. He was incensed that what I had thought was a sympathetic film had “got [him] so wrong”. I agreed with him to try and set it right, and planned to meet him on his release at the prison gates, to drive from Texas to his hometown in the Appalachian mountains. 

Last month, after 8 years of writing, I set out to meet again the man who had become my friend, to talk about what the film might be.