Japanese experimental filmmaker Kaori Oda uses her camera as a navigational tool, feeling her way through unfamiliar worlds, particularly subterranean terrains, in her “underground” experimental non-fiction features. These films are dazzling visual and sensory experiences that at first seem preoccupied with remote, unlivable landscapes. Yet within even the most extreme locales, Oda reveals a strikingly syncretic world – one in which nonhuman landscapes converse with human memories, desires, and cosmologies.

In the two decades of the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of filmmakers united into film clubs, and film collectives, a shift from an individual, hierarchical model of production to one based on fluidity and embracing the DIY and ‘amateur’ spirit of such collaborations. Nevertheless, the screening and post-screening talk aim to emphasise the labour of female filmmakers within such collectives, who are often written out of the narratives of their radical efforts.