YIDFF Network Special Screening
The YIDFF Network is a volunteer group that came together for the inaugural YIDFF in 1989 at the initiative of filmmaker Ogawa Shinsuke. Its wide range of activities includes organizing Friday Theater, a series of screenings for the general public; participation in the selection of films for the festival; and publication activities. In addition, the YIDFF Network Special Screenings present films reflecting the volunteers’ own perspectives.
In Their Traces
(Tamashii no kiseki)- JAPAN / 2025 / Japanese / Color / DCP / 97 min
Director: Kobayashi Shigeru
Photography: Oda Kaori
Editing: Hata Takeshi
Sound: Kawakami Takuya
Producers: Nagakura Norio, Hata Takeshi
Line Producer: Suto Nobuhiko
Production Company: Kasama film
Sexual abuse has been characterized as a “murder of the spirit.” But is this a suffering that one person must bear alone? Beyond despair, there is hope, a faint ray of light from the spirit.
A friend of the filmmaker suffers from PTSD, having flashbacks of sexual abuse. Having witnessed this, the filmmaker meets a photographer who is also a survivor and decides to make a film. The long production process lasts eight years. What is the nature of the despair, and the hope, that reside deep within these people suffering from PTSD conditions including regret, murderous impulses, depression, insomnia, detachment, and suicidal thoughts? The director appears on screen, questioning the very meaning of making this film. He tries to see light in how they live, looking upward from the depths of suffering.
[Director’s Statement] Around the time she turned forty, a friend of mine who had worked with me to support people suffering from Minamata disease when we were younger began having flashbacks. They were caused by sexual abuse she suffered in elementary school. Here we were, thirty years later. I was reminded of my own childhood suffering. Then, I met a photographer who was working to shed light on sexual abuse, and I became determined to make a film. At that point, the head of the counseling room came forward and said, “I’m also a survivor.”
Akashi Kaijin, a poet who suffered from leprosy, once said: “Like the fish that live in the deep sea, there will be no light for us anywhere unless we ourselves burn.” Survivors carrying PTSD—where simply being alive feels like a miracle—have raised faint voices.
As a documentary filmmaker with a friend who is a survivor, I came to feel that I wanted to make a film to help people understand the reality of sexual abuse. The truth lies somewhere that those who have not experienced sexual abuse cannot reach, no matter how hard they try. But in listening to survivors, it is possible to be there for them, somewhere close by. I anticipated that this would be a difficult film to make. I am extremely grateful that I was able to bring it to completion, through the encouragement of my crew and the support of so many people. I have no words to express my gratitude to the people who appear in the film.
Toward the end of the production process, I felt that I needed to incorporate the domestic violence I myself once experienced growing up in a household with parents who had repatriated from the former Manchuria, carrying the weight of the war with them, and I ended up appearing in the film myself. Recently, researchers have been studying the relationship between war and the problem of postwar domestic violence, and it has been pointed out that war is part of the background for sexual abuse.
People have begun to speak out, as we have seen in the global #MeToo movement against sexual harm and in sexual abuse cases across various fields. I hope that this film will bring the difficult-to-articulate term “sexual violence” out into the open and at the same time also give expression to inner struggle mentioned in the title.
Kobayashi Shigeru
Born in 1954 in Niigata Prefecture, Kobayashi was mentored by filmmaker Yanagisawa Hisao. He received one of the inaugural JSC (Japanese Society of Cinematographers) Awards for his work as a cinematographer on Living on the River Agano (1992, directed by Sato Makoto, winner of the Runner-Up Prize in the YIDFF ’93 International Competition), a film that was produced on the Aga River in Niigata in a community affected by Minamata disease. He both shot and directed And Life Goes On (2004, YIDFF 2005), which won an Agency for Cultural Affairs Film Award from the Japanese government and a Mainichi Film Concours Documentary & Cultural Film Award. His other films as director include Children in the Cosmos (2000), A Patch of Blue Sky (2001, YIDFF 2001), Chokora! (2008, YIDFF 2011), and Dryads in a Snow Valley (2015, YIDFF 2015). Despite suffering from kidney failure, he has consistently sought to capture the depths of human experience through long-term engagement with his subjects.