Directed by: Mile Nagaoka | 2022 | 84 minutes

Maybe this doesn’t need to be said again, but in every era, you find someone who was making a record of that era. And it was probably someone who just happened to have the connection and took on the job. I may not remember every word and phrase I heard during my time filming, but one thing that sticks with me now is the story about how, “everyone who hears the drums of the Oeshiki is connected.” It isn't the sort of connection that binds tightly, making it hard to move. Perhaps it’s something that’s just always there: expanding infinitely, like ripples. Maybe that’s how those ripples reached me.

As I filmed, I realized that now, because of the pandemic, it was an opportunity not to create a video catalog of each group’s performance, but to record this experience of not being able to hold the festivals. I realized that I had the responsibility to add this record to the records made before me. Why can’t the festivals be held? What happens when they’re not held? Here's my current hypothesis that I formed in response to these questions through three months of filming.

Not being able to hold festivals, not producing a beat, is strongly connected to the continuation of the community that carries those things out. This is because festivals are a central component in ensuring a sense of community. To take it further, festivals are community, and they are the guardian deity of the community. If no beat is made, it doesn’t echo through that land, the connections aren’t made, and people’s ties to one-another are cut. When the beats stopped, we realized this for the first time. That’s why the beats must not be stopped. Because that’s where people live.