Neo SoraFolding different temporalities: An Interview with Neo Sora Maja Korbecka July 2025 Interviews Issue 114 I met Neo Sora on a sunny morning in March in Amsterdam. His first fiction feature film, Happyend, was the opening film of the 17th CinemAsia Film Festival, the event dedicated to introducing Asian films to local audiences, building community, and celebrating queer and hybrid identities. Although it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2024, CinemAsia is a more fitting environment within to frame the film. Happyend is about a group of friends from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds who are about to graduate high school in a near-future Japan. Meanwhile, the political system becomes increasingly authoritarian as the danger of a disastrous earthquake looms. One night, the group pulls a prank on their high school principal which is interpreted as an act of terrorism. It results in increased surveillance, but the main problem remains the issue of accountability in an increasingly divided society. Happyend is a classic bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of social and cultural changes. But in addition to a sharp look at social inequality in Japan it also manages to animate the feeling of a slow-approaching apocalypse, whether it’s personal or collective. The bittersweet feeling of knowing that a certain way of life is about to come to an end. Sora has made several short films and a feature concert film, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (2023), documenting his father’s final performance. In Happyend Sora delves into topics he feels most passionate about – discussing how the history of a colonial empire shapes contemporary and possible future directions of Japanese society and politics. – M.K *** I first saw Happyend on my laptop but only watching it in the cinema allowed me to notice the use of sound and how it plays with the visuals. I was totally struck by how well you edited it. I’m glad. I feel like the biggest difference between a small screen and the cinema is actually more about the sound than the size of the screen. You can experience the full-body sound. Especially in several scenes – I’m thinking about the earthquake scene now. Because it’s without any sound, it creates this sensory feeling that’s very confusing. I was wondering – how did you decide to do the sound design that way? I made a short film before Happyend as a proof of concept. It featured the same characters, similar world setting – I was testing out some things, including how to film a convincing earthquake. In the short film, I kept the camera still and shook all the stuff in front of it. In Happyend, I changed that and shook the camera as well. In the short film, I added sound to the earthquake, and it worked fine. But when I got feedback on the short film, some people said they were actually afraid – not just of the alarm, but the shaking. I became sensitive about depicting the earthquake in Happyend, because although it’s real in the story, it’s also a metaphor. Happyend When you live in Japan – and of course in other places too – earthquakes are a very real threat that bring real trauma. I didn’t want to trigger that trauma. Recreating the sensory feeling of an earthquake with sound did trigger some people, which I felt was unnecessary. When I took out the sound instead, it became very unnerving – so it preserved the destabilising feeling without directly triggering traumatic experiences. I’ve never experienced a major earthquake. In Taipei, yes, but they weren’t very big. Still, your film captured the fear and the sense of sensory disconnection. There are two times when the sound cuts out completely – the earthquake, and then the end, when the two characters look at each other. Those are the only two moments of complete silence, and they both coincide with major turning points in the story – a kind of rupture. So I split the film structurally with those silences. Like the earthquake is the end of a friendship – tectonic plates shifting. Exactly. If you mapped the film in a spreadsheet, you’d see that every time there’s an earthquake – or even something similar, like alarms or camera shakes – it coincides with big emotional shifts between the characters. That was a structural anchor. And the stop-motion moments too. They created this fascinating structure – it reminded me a little of Godard’s 1980s films. Why did you choose the title Happyend? Originally, the working title was Earthquake. But I never liked it. I’m a simple person – I give my projects obvious titles when I start. My past short where the main thing is a chicken? It’s called The Chicken. In the short film Proof of Concept there’s a fake glass bottle made of sugar, so originally the film was called Sugar Glass Bottle. So this one started as Earthquake. But I didn’t want to set up the expectation that the film would be about earthquakes. I had no idea what to change it to. I wrote hundreds of title ideas on my phone, and Happyend was the only one that made me feel something. It just felt right. Later, I realised it captured the tension in the film: happy evokes youthful energy; end captures apocalypse, collapse. It reflects on the ending in an interesting, ambiguous way. It’s bittersweet – like graduation. You move on, but there’s sadness in leaving something behind. In a previous interview, you mentioned Aguirre (Werner Herzog, 1972) and Edward Yang as pivotal for you. I love the story of Edward Yang seeing Aguirre by accident and being changed forever. What’s your story with Aguirre? I saw it at school – so not as serendipitous as Yang’s story. But it hit me hard. If you’ve seen it, you know the feeling – the shock. Klaus Kinski grabbing the monkey at the end left a deep impression. I watched it again and again, trying to figure it out. Later, I learned about Herzog – the legend, the madness. I had seen Grizzly Man (Herzog, 2005) before Aguirre, but after Aguirre, I got obsessed with New German Cinema. I discovered Fassbinder and eventually preferred his works over Herzog’s. The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) is one of my favourite films. That whole rabbit hole made me want to become a filmmaker. Then I discovered Edward Yang much later. First Tsai Ming-liang, then New Taiwan Cinema more broadly – Hou Hsiao-hsien, and eventually Edward Yang. Watching your film, I thought of Taipei Story – how Yang films characters from a distance but edits sound as if they’re close. You do that too. I think anyone who knows Edward Yang will see his influence in my film, and that’s fair – I love him. I think what links the filmmakers I admire – Herzog, Fassbinder, Yang – is the relationship between landscape and person. For me, landscapes are as expressive as people, sometimes more. My film is about how society and politics affect individuals and friendships. So it was important to show the characters’ surroundings. Yang’s scale and distance – how he films cities and people – he has figured out how to portray interconnectedness between the two. I grew up in cities, and the way Yang films cityscape just matches how I experience urban life. Happyend Let’s talk about Kobe. Why did you choose to shoot there? Originally, I wanted to shoot in Tokyo, especially the east side, since the 1923 earthquake was one of the film’s inspirations. But Tokyo is hard to shoot in – too many regulations, and people aren’t that welcoming to film crews. More importantly, we couldn’t find a school. About 70–80% of the film takes place in the school. We saw almost every school location in the Kanto-Tokyo area. Either the buildings were good but too rural, or they were ex-elementary schools, and the desks were too small. We found a university campus that seemed fitting but when we asked if we could put a car standing upright in the courtyard, they just said no. Eventually, we expanded our search. Kobe has one of the best film commissions in Japan – I think it is the oldest and very welcoming. When we first arrived, we stepped out of the station, and this elderly couple smiled and waved at us. Then we got free bread from a bakery. It felt like the entire city was welcoming us. One of my producers is a white guy so clearly a foreign-looking person in Japan but everyone in Kobe was very nice to us. We found the perfect school: a tech and engineering school that even helped us install a car setup for a scene – they were enthusiastic. And setting the film in Kobe added depth. The city experienced a major earthquake in 1995, the Hanshin-Awaji quake. In a lot of different places in Japan, including Fukushima and Tokyo, every time there’s a big earthquake, racist rumours start to circulate – online and offline. But apparently in Kobe, because it’s a port city and because a lot of non-Japanese people have settled there over decades, the racism wasn’t as severe. There were more mutual aid initiatives, such as citizen radio, that started to put out information in multiple languages about the earthquakes and evacuation. This was all done through a grassroots network – fellow citizens trying to be helpful to each other. So there’s something about Kobe that is different from even other port cities like Yokohama or Nagasaki. I think it’s largely because in Nagasaki and Yokohama, when the ports opened up, they built trade cities that segregated Japanese people from foreigners, whereas in Kobe, somehow, that didn’t happen, and everyone ended up living side by side. There really is this difference that Kobe has toward people who are not ethnically Japanese. I’m sure there are issues, like in every place. But you know, I think you can feel that sense of openness and kindness while walking around the city, in the way people interact with you. If it wasn’t for the ending credits, I wouldn’t know that it was filmed in Kobe. Originally in the script, the default place was Tokyo, but we minimised that. I wanted the location to feel like an amalgam of cities, like Gotham. How was the casting process? It was done mostly in Tokyo. We had a casting director who knew my taste and brought a wide range of people, including models. Interestingly, young actors with experience often had worse habits than complete newcomers. In the end, casting was intuitive. When the right people walked in, I just knew. It is just like falling in love. Then I checked if they could act – and they could. Miraculously, I found five perfect people. They also got along really well. That was crucial – I needed them to feel like they’d been friends for 10 years from day one. They actually became real friends. Now Yuta and Ko live together as roommates! Neo Sora and Maja Korbecka Did the actors influence the script? Not much. I wasn’t strict – they could say things in a way that felt natural. But they stuck closely to the script. I was prepared to change it, especially since they were mostly inexperienced actors. To have ownership over words that aren’t yours or ideas that aren’t yours takes a lot of technique. And so I was prepared to change the words and change the ideas a little bit to make sure that they can say it comfortably. But I didn’t really need to do too much of that. It all just clicked. Is there a topic you wish more interviewers asked about? There’s a big difference in how audiences in the West and East understand the film – mainly due to knowledge of colonialism. Some Western reviews say there are too many themes, but to me, it’s all one theme: colonialism. I don’t make it 100% clear in the film, not because I don’t think it’s necessary, but because, in terms of thematic grounding, you know, for me, what’s really important is to understand that all of the different themes – about identity, whether you are Japanese or foreign, the ideas about xenophobia and racism in Japan, and also the ideas of surveillance and fascism that are present in the film – are all, within the Japanese context, just echoes of Japanese colonialism making their way into modern-day structures of society. For example, in 1923 following a massive earthquake, there was a massacre of ethnic Koreans living in Japan. At the time, they were technically Japanese subjects as Japan colonised Korea between 1910 and 1945. After 1947, the Foreigner Registration Act made them “deportable.” That legal structure persists today in Japan’s immigration detention system. Originally, when Japan was colonising all these countries in Asia – including Taiwan, Indonesia, and parts of China – all these people that are now considered foreign used to be considered as citizens of the Japanese empire. There was occasionally forcible displacement, but also some people, could travel across the borders, as part of Japan. But in 1947, the final kind of law that the Japanese emperor put into place was a law called the Foreigner Registration Act. And it basically made the category of foreigners, gaikokujin, versus Japanese people. The reason why he did this was because of the insistence of the GHQ, the American occupants after Japan lost the II World War. They needed to control the flow of people in and out of Japan, this border that is not yet created. So the way in which they defined foreigner was a category of people that are deportable. That is the only definition of foreigners that they came up with at the time. And the immigration department that controls the flow of people in and out of Japan is the exact same structure that remains today as the immigration detention centre in Japan, which is doing some horrible human rights abuses. It’s a really big problem in Japan today, and I think it’s part of the reason why the police survey foreigners all the time. There is so much racial profiling within Japan, and so it’s all connected in this one theme that I was thinking about and exploring in Happyend. I usually clarify this context during the Q&As after the screening just for additional information because I think it does make people realise that all those themes that seem so disparate from each other are actually all connected in one sort of fundamental root cause. It was striking to me when I chatted with some Japanese tourists in Taiwan who didn’t know Taiwan was colonised by Japan. It’s the way history is taught. Japan was one of the worst imperial powers, yet it’s rehabilitated its image so well post-WWII that most people, even outside Japan, aren’t aware of that history. And increasingly, the Japanese Ministry of Culture gradually reduces or reframes historical content in textbooks. I made a documentary about Ainu people in the north of Japan. When I was in Hokkaido, there was an issue because the state had just reissued historical textbooks. It used to say Japanese people colonised Hokkaido and took their land. It was rewritten to say Japanese people gave agricultural land to the Ainu people. Even in Hokkaido, they’re rewriting the narrative. It’s like saying Japan “modernised” Taiwan. It’s a global issue – so many places are erasing history. The more I learn about Japanese history, for example during the World War II period, the more I become aware of how Japan acted as one of the worst kinds of imperial forces in the world at the time. Even in the context of what is happening right now, for example – one of the things a lot of people compare Gaza to is Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But maybe that’s not the right comparison, because one of the first instances after Guernica of a strategic bombing of civilians was conducted by Japanese forces in one of Chinese war-time capitals, Chongqing. It is the Japanese army that developed it as a tactic, as a strategy. Japanese people usually have no idea about any of this, because it’s just not taught in school. And I think that’s one of the big reasons why there is so much xenophobia in Japan – because they see Korean people or some Chinese people very rightfully being sceptical of the Japanese because of this colonial past. But in Japan, because they don’t have that historical perspective, it’s like, “Why are these people hating on us?” I think there is just very little political awareness. Your film opens with a scene of characters going to a Chinese-owned techno club. I was wondering what is your connection to China? One of the things I was thinking a lot about when designing this future world – just a bit more dystopian than our current one – was how, arguably, our present might already be even worse than fiction. This was eight years ago, when I first started thinking about it, and I was really influenced by William Gibson’s idea that “the future is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed.” At the time, I was noticing things happening in Beijing. I remember a 2015 news article about the installation of a social credit system – Sesame Credits – and also about a problematic traffic crossing where the solution was to put up massive screens. If you violated a rule, like crossing on a red light, your personal information would be displayed on the screen. That’s one example. Then there’s a shot in the film of the Prime Minister’s face on a building – that came directly from an image I saw of Putin’s face on a huge Russian building. And then there’s the bento-throwing scene – that came from the George W. Bush shoe-throwing incident. I was basically gathering all these fragments I’d seen around the world and imagining: what if I brought them all together into Japan, into a school? And the title – Happyend – almost echoes this idea. It’s like the end of the world is already here. There’s a kind of silence before the storm. Exactly. And to me, the strongest symbol of that in Japan is the way we’re constantly told a huge earthquake is going to hit Tokyo. Every year, there’s a new TV program about how to behave when “the big one” comes, with CG simulations of catastrophic damage. The expectation of that disaster becomes its own kind of fear. Maybe when it happens it will be terrifying, but this constant anticipation – the unseen catastrophe – is already traumatic. There’s a philosopher, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who wrote about catastrophe having its own sense of time. In How to Think About Catastrophe: Toward a Theory of Enlightened Doomsaying he talks about how, as you get closer to a catastrophe – whether it’s your own death or a major societal collapse – time actually expands in a strange way. I still don’t fully understand his idea, but it fascinated me, catastrophe bends time. I’m also really drawn to Walter Benjamin’s concept of messianic time. Giorgio Agamben also reinterprets this in a different way. But Benjamin talks about messianic time as a kind of hope within the collapse of law and sovereignty – a moment when everything falls apart, but that very collapse is what makes hope possible. We live in an auto-destructive world, and only in that kind of world can we imagine something new. So I was thinking a lot about this weird temporality, where ideas of the future, the past, and memory all collapse into each other. It feels like we’re living in this apocalyptic-messianic moment. Like an implosion into a black hole. That was something I was thinking about when trying to understand the temporality of the film. A lot of people say the film feels futuristic, but also nostalgic. They say it recalls the imagery of protests from the 1960s and ’70s. That’s because I was intentionally folding different temporalities into each other. I didn’t want to use flashbacks. Instead, I shared an idea with the cast and crew that we would approach the whole film as if it were a memory – as if Yuta and Ko, at age 34 or something, are remembering their high school days. Even though the story is set in the future, the perspective is from an even further future, looking back. That shaped everything: the shots, the music, the storytelling. That really comes through in the soundtrack – it’s original, but it feels like 1980s or 1990s Japanese cinema, very nostalgic. Yes. I wanted the music to reflect how Yuta and Ko would remember these moments. There’s an emotional distance. Like – say you fought with your friend. The moment it happens, it is painful. But from the future perspective, you might see it as the first time you were truly honest with each other. Or maybe you had a joyful, youthful moment – but looking back, knowing it’s gone, it becomes melancholic. That emotional distance was really important to me. It’s why the film feels nostalgic and futuristic at once. It’s confusing, temporally. There’s also this layering of personal and collective memory. It’s all in the same space, but not at the same time. Everything coexists. Yes, but I didn’t want to make that explicit. I just wanted the feeling to come through. Our generation is really consumed by nostalgia. Why is that? Part of me understands Yuta’s attitude: “There’s nothing new anymore.” Everything is just from the past. He digs through old music looking for forgotten gems. But another part of me aligns with the shopkeeper who says, “Don’t say such a sad thing.” Of course new things are possible. Our imagination can still bring things into the world that have never existed before. But then, you look at AI – nothing it does is really new. It’s just recombining past data into new arrangements. That’s true of all art, of course, but especially with AI, it’s about the dataset. The worst part is that the reading stays the same. Past music, for example, can feel totally new – if it’s unknown. It’s not canonical, so it’s new to us. It can be re-watched, re-heard, re-read – and interpreted anew. I agree. But there’s also a big difference in how media is consumed today. In the TV and radio era, it was kind of a monoculture. Someone like Michael Jackson or The Beatles could be heard even in remote villages. That influence was huge. You could expect that people shared certain cultural touchstones. Now, we have access to everything at once, all the time. People retreat into niches and pocket histories. That always existed, but now it’s more extreme. So people are more disconnected? That’s what people say – that the internet creates bubbles and isolates us. To some extent, I think that’s true. There’s a kind of alienation that comes from not needing to interact. In urban Japan, especially, you don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to. That builds up imaginary enemies – you project assumptions onto the person next to you. You might see an older man in a suit and assume he’s a misogynist. But maybe he’s queer on the weekends. You never know. It’s not just the internet. It’s also an urban–rural divide. In rural areas, you have to interact with others to survive. It’s more complex than just “internet bubbles.” It’s good not to be too pessimistic about our generation. Exactly. Despite all the scary changes, there’s hope. When it comes to Japan, I actually have more hope for people my age and younger than for the generation that lived through the economic bubble. They’re the ones in power now, and they’re messing everything up – just like in Taiwan. They have money and privilege, and they’re trying to recreate the past. They’re clinging to their ideal youth – the 1960s – and throwing all this energy into things like the Osaka Expo or the Olympics. But the world doesn’t work like that anymore. Do you have plans for your next project? I’m working on a script with too many ideas. It might be a five-hour film – or multiple films. It’ll be a comedy. We desperately need comedy films now, just to preserve some sort of sanity and take our minds off the current political and economic situation for a second. I agree.
