Invisible People: an exploratory, experimental film on Butoh

Berger spent four years living in Japan, moving within communities of dancers, filmmakers, and musicians. What began as informal, narration-free filming — including weekly visits to Yoshito Ohno’s studio — slowly unfolded into a long-term cinematic attention to Butoh as it continues to exist today. Invisible People follows dancers who hover between visibility and invisibility, between appearing and disappearing and memory. Rather than explaining or historicizing, the film stays close to bodies, gestures, atmospheres — allowing presence to emerge, waver, recede, and return. It’s also a film about fathers- her own and the final „father figure“ Yoshito Ohno. It is attentive to what flickers at the edge of perception. In conversation, Achatz and Berger explore artistic collaborations, alliances,  the contemporary Butoh dance scene in Japan and how Butoh inhabits thresholds between life and death, presence and absence. An episode for listeners drawn to dance, Japan, experimental cinema.