RADICAL OBSERVATION: The Films of Kazuhiro Soda

It’s no secret that the last twenty years have seen an explosion in disorientingly slick and overproduced non-fiction cinema. All the more reason there’s something revelatory about the films of Kazuhiro Soda, who spent many years producing docs for NHK, the biggest broadcasting corporation in his native Japan, before becoming a one-man-crew to follow an old classmate running for local office in the classic CAMPAIGN (2007). Soda makes crucial decisions on the fly after winning the trust of the people he’s interviewing; when those arrangements threaten to encroach on the drama onscreen, the filmmaker never hides his role in the proceedings. A prolific author, citizen journalist and cat-lover, Soda is an utterly one-of-a-kind documentarian, celebrated at festivals and seminars worldwide in the decade since CAMPAIGN. This spring, in addition to multiple opportunities to see his breathtaking new INLAND SEA, Spectacle is honored to host the maverick documentarian for a two-month retrospective of Soda’s “observational films”, including his deep dive into the University of Michigan’s massive football stadium THE BIG HOUSE (made in collaboration with a class of undergraduates, when Soda was a visiting professor.)