TRACE OF NOWHERE

No dialogue. One performer. A story where absence and fullness cycle. A landmark cinematic vision where Japan’s ancient beauty returns—sacred, sensual, and unlike anything seen before. From the volcanic ridges of Izu Island to the towering facades of central Tokyo, “Trace of Nowhere” emerges not as a narrative, but as a reverberation—an answer to something deep, ancient, and never fully seen. This is not cinema that speaks, but cinema that listens. It is a contemporary invocation of Japan’s most enduring aesthetic tradition: yūgen—that which is hidden, fleeting, and mysteriously resonant. At its center stands only Butoh dancer Mizuki Gojo, a silent guide whose every breath, pause, and gesture evokes the ineffable. Her presence is not merely a performance, but a threshold—her movements offering the body as a shrine, memory, and passage. She becomes a conduit of sacred sensuality—tactile, poised, and drawn from elsewhere. Director Rei Stott, through a camera that gathers rather than commands, becomes a vessel for the world's quiet urgencies—one who gazes with attunement and guides the viewer across the unseen threshold between this world and another. The film leads us through a world where wind and concrete, stillness and motion, spirit and surface, whisper across each other. What was personal becomes eternal. What was local becomes mythic. ”Trace of Nowhere” is a contemporary Japanese vision rooted in millennia of sensibility: where fragility is power, silence is structure, and ritual is revelation. A ritual of beauty—elemental, ancient, and deeply Japanese—summoned into the now. It is a gesture—graceful, austere, and enduring—toward a world that calls, and waits to be called back. ------------------------------------------ About our Production Method This film production project began shooting without a predetermined overall script. During filming, locations were selected spontaneously across the island, forest, and town areas, and dancer Mizuki Kawashiro performed improvised movements tailored to each space. Every scene was captured in a single take, without retakes. Here, the dancer's body itself radiates meaning, condensing the voice of the space. From the resulting footage, the inevitability inherent in its randomness was discovered, and a narrative emerged guided by the meaning intuitively perceived within it. Through this approach, an attempt was made to create a “primordial myth through film” transcending the realm of human skill (= poetry). To capture clear footage serving as a “passageway” conveying the dancer's powerful transformation of space, director Rei Stott insisted on shooting through the camera's viewfinder. Using a camera integrated with her own left eye, she filmed through improvisational bodily manipulation driven by her inner body, attempting to create direct physical resonance between dancer → filmer → audience. The footage, imbued with the dual “void” physicality of dancer and filmmaker, is further integrated with Hideki Yamakawa's exquisite music, amplifying the nuance of “void.” This union manifests the profound, dense philosophy of “yugen” inherent in the modern city as tangible reality.