Filming Ueno Park with Neo Sora

Ueno Park was among Japan’s first public parks. Its creation was a reflection of Japan’s opening up in the late 1800s, after the end of the Sakoku era, when the country was almost totally closed off to foreigners. A product of the country’s cultural interest in the West at the time, it could, at first glance, be mistaken for the grand municipal gardens of Paris or London, and, like all parks, it is both a respite from the city and a reflection of it.

An oasis, but never totally separate from the city and its history, and all its problems and possibilities. Alongside the famed giant pandas of the park’s zoo, who returned to China earlier this year, Ueno has, over the course of its existence, been home to sex workers, drug dealers, cherry blossom trees, tourists, city folk, lunch breakers, market stalls, performers, walkers, and all manner of wildlife.

“The goal is to create a moving portrait of present-day Tokyo that is neither documentary nor fiction, but an arabesque landscape, tuned in not to the big political events of the time, but to the details of everyday life bristling with activity.”

At its centre is Shinobazu Lake. It is here that we find Neo Sora, armed with his 16mm Bolex camera. Based between Tokyo and New York, the filmmaker is in the earliest stages of making a cinematic portrait of the park, the lake in particular, and the year-long cycle of the mass of lotus plants which float on it.

“The lotuses mark time,” he says, as we look over a wooden pier and down at the expanse of them. “In winter, the pond is a field of dead stalks, and then in the summer, the lotuses bloom, something that’s captured the imagination of many Japanese writers.” He quotes Yasunari Kawabata, Japanese poet, novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize, who described the lotuses as charming explosions. “Against that slow cycle of the lotuses, the people and animals come and go at their own pace. I’m trying to stay attuned to both speeds at once.”

At the moment, Neo is still working out what works, gauging how things look when filmed. When he’s in town, he spends a lot of time in the park, walking around, looking at the lake, observing the people who accumulate here, watching the ducks and herons. “The two are one and the same to me,” Neo says as we begin a loop around the park. “What’s important is seeing the people and the park together. The people are just as much part of the landscape as the lotuses are.”

Neo has made two films so far. The first, Opus, is a concert film documenting the final performance of his late father, Ryuichi Sakamoto. The second, Happyend, is a coming-of-age tale set in a dystopian-ish, futuristic-ish Japan. 

“Originally, I was interested in anthropology and linguistics, but I ended up drifting towards filmmaking, photography, and installation art. My ultimate dream was to make fiction films. I started writing the screenplay for Happyend around 2017,” Neo explains. “I struggled to get it off the ground, but I made it eventually. It came out in 2024 and I spent a year travelling with the film to festivals, but the longer I travelled with the film, the more I realised I was talking about filmmaking and hadn’t really touched the materials of filmmaking, like how a musician might pick up an instrument, or a painter a paintbrush.”

“That’s when I met Kamal Aljafari, who pulled me into helping with a short he directed, called Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo,” he continues. “Kamal had such a freedom with the process of filmmaking. Working with him was a big inspiration as to why I started to shoot the park.”

“A lot of what seems to be suppressed in the rest of the city comes bursting out here.”

Happyend is set in near-future Japan, a country threatened by catastrophic earthquakes, authoritarian surveillance, and growing political unrest. It follows two best friends, aspiring DJs approaching the end of high school, whose responses to these things test their friendship. This short summary does a disservice to the breadth of its themes; it’s a film about authority, conformity and resistance, but it’s also about music, time, space, and the fleetingness of youth, too, which blooms briefly, just like the lotus flower of Shinobazu.

“The three films I’ve made are completely different on the surface, but I think each tries to portray the emotion of a landscape, and I think that comes from a shared sensibility connected to the philosophy of the sublime. In Opus, the landscape is a person and a performance unfolding in real time. In Happyend, it’s a city and a generation. In Ueno, it’s a pond and the people around it.”

It is an idea that seems particularly suited to Ueno, where the park’s history is inseparable from the lives that unfold within it. The park and its lake offer a way of reading the city at a human scale, through the people who come here to spend an afternoon, escape the noise or simply sit by the water.

“It’s a refuge for people who need a break from the density of the city. What made me feel there was a film to be made here is how people behave. In the rest of the city, people in Tokyo tend to be quiet and contained. Outside of the main commercial hubs, the city is so still and private. The rhythm and motion that give life to a city just aren’t felt.

“For example, many traditional festivals that used to attract the local communities into the streets have been forced to scale down due to noise complaints. The Tokyo Olympics in 2021 justified sweeping the unhoused from the streets. In the 60s and 70s, Tokyo was a hotbed for student movements, but the city now treats any protest as a nuisance. The bands that would occupy the parks to play their noise shows are all gone. Everyone is always asking whether people have received appropriate permission from the authorities to do anything. But, around the pond, people drink in groups, laugh, sometimes they sing. Musicians perform and art students are making art. A lot of what seems to be suppressed in the rest of the city comes bursting out here.”

“What I want to find out is whether you can feel history from the ground: in people’s faces, in the rhythm of a place, in the small things that happen.”

For Neo, the challenge is to capture this life. He wants to find a way of filming the place that allows its different histories and rhythms to coexist, the slow growth of the lotuses alongside the fleeting encounters of the people who pass through.

“The pond is a way in. What I want to find out is whether you can feel history from the ground: in people’s faces, in the rhythm of a place, in the small things that happen. The goal is to create a moving portrait of present-day Tokyo that is neither document nor invention, but an arabesque landscape, tuned in not to the big political events of the time, but to the details of everyday life bristling with activity. Not unlike Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Procession to Calvary, where the focus is not on Christ, but on the common life in a particular moment in time.”