Visions du Réel 2026: Exclusive GHOST TOWN Trailer Premiere
British filmmaker Katharine Round returns to the international documentary spotlight with Ghost Town, unveiled through an exclusive trailer premiere ahead of its debut at Visions du Réel.
Known for her formally inquisitive non-fiction work, Round here expands her exploration of the “encounter” into something more elusive: a cinematic séance unfolding on the margins of reality.
Set in the Japanese port town of Kamaishi, Ghost Town emerges from the lingering aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, yet resists conventional frameworks of trauma reportage. Instead, Round constructs a hybrid space between documentary observation and dream logic.
Her central device is deceptively simple: a taxi rigged with cameras, moving through the night as drivers and passengers engage in spontaneous conversations. What begins as testimony gradually drifts into something stranger, accounts of ghostly encounters, premonitions, and presences that refuse to remain invisible.
The film’s structure unfolds over the course of a single night, but temporality here is porous. Memory, grief and imagination coexist without hierarchy. A driver recounts sightings of spectral passengers; another speaks of a phone box filled with spirits attempting to call through. Elsewhere, fragments of ordinary life -- gambling habits, karaoke songs, fleeting regrets -- interweave with the metaphysical, suggesting a continuum rather than a rupture between the living and the dead.
The taxi becomes a “moving confession booth,” but also a liminal cinematic chamber, part documentary apparatus, part narrative stage. The presence of journalist and filmmaker Shiori Ito, who appears in the film as “The Visitor,” subtly destabilizes the boundary between participant and observer. Positioned as both insider and outsider, Ito functions as a conduit through which unspoken histories surface, reinforcing the film’s preoccupation with thresholds, between subject and author, presence and absence.
Official synopsis: In a Japanese coastal town still haunted by the 2011 tsunami, a taxi becomes a moving confession booth. Over the course of one night, a series of conversations between drivers and their passengers reveal how those who survived live with the dead - as ghostly tales, dreams and everyday life merge in a magical drift between reality and imagination.
Ghost Town has the world premiere on April 23 in the International Medium Length & Short Film Competition at the Visions du Réel International Film Festival Nyon.
