Karlovy Vary 2026 Interview: INCINERATOR Filmmaker Shuntaro Uchida on Childhood, Memory and the Luxury of Slow Time

Japanese filmmaker Shuntaro Uchida’s Incinerator is a poetic coming-of-age drama, centered on ten-year-old Kozue, an isolated schoolgirl who secretly feeds objects into her school’s incinerator until an encounter with university student Jinta and a shadow-play performance unsettles her carefully contained world.

Adapted from a short story by acclaimed author Kaori Ekuni, the film unfolds across languid summer days, observing childhood as a state of heightened curiosity, confusion and vulnerability, in which family tensions, mortality and first stirrings of desire remain difficult to name.

In the talk with Screen Anarchy, Uchida discusses expanding Ekuni’s brief text into a feature, working with young and first-time actors, recreating the analogue atmosphere of 1995, and using light, shadow, silence and sound to convey the way children encounter an adult world that often appears impenetrable.

Screen Anarchy: The film does not feel as though it is set in central Tokyo. How did you imagine its physical setting?

Shuntaro Uchida: The original story does not specify one precise location, so I was always imagining where it might take place. It was important for me to find somewhere to which I could feel a personal attachment, somewhere that reminded me of my own childhood.

We found a beautiful house in Tokyo and an elementary school in Chiba, about an hour away. The producer and I kept discussing what kind of place the story belonged to. That process of searching was a beautiful part of making the film. It is not really central Tokyo. It is closer to a local neighborhood, where you can feel the presence of people and their everyday lives.

Kaori Ekuni’s original story is only around 20 pages long. What attracted you to it, and how did you approach turning it into a feature?

It was certainly challenging. But because the story was so short, there was also a great deal of space for imagination. I could imagine what might have happened before a particular moment, what could happen afterward and what might exist outside the pages.

Once that process began, the flow of ideas did not stop. Ekuni-san gave us a very powerful foundation. Because the original story was so strong, we were able to build a film around it.

How closely did you work with her while writing the screenplay?

We communicated entirely by email and did not meet in person until the film had been completed. Whenever I developed a new part of the screenplay, I sent it to her so that she could read it. She was always positive and gave me feedback. She was very open to my ideas.

Sometimes she would say, “That is not how I wrote it, but if this is the direction you want to take, I accept it.” She never tried to control the screenplay. I was extremely nervous when we finally met after the film was finished. But she gave me many compliments, which was an enormous relief. I had worried that she might have doubts about the adaptation, but that did not happen. I was very happy.

The family is marked by silence and a lack of communication. Were you trying to depict a typical Japanese household?

No, I would not say it is a typical Japanese family. What I wanted to depict was the world as Kozue sees it.

From her perspective, her parents do not communicate enough, but I was not presenting that family as representative of all Japanese families. The film is about the way a child observes something without necessarily having the words to explain it.

Did your own childhood influence your connection with Kozue?

Very much. There were many moments in the original story in which I felt close to her. As a child, I was afraid of getting injections at school and of going to the swimming pool. In music class, we sometimes had to sing alone in front of all the other students, which frightened me.

Although Kozue is a girl and I was a boy, I recognized many of those feelings. A number of my own childhood experiences entered the film.

One of the film’s most striking passages is the shadow-puppet performance of “The Red Candle and the Mermaid.” Why did you give it such prominence?

It is mentioned only very briefly in the original story, but it felt extremely important to me, so we decided to make the sequence much longer in the film. The scene was developed collectively.

The sound and lighting teams contributed many ideas, and we spent a long time discussing how it should work. The shadow play brought together many of the film’s central elements: light, darkness, imagination and the slightly frightening quality that familiar things can have when you are a child.

Light and shadow recur throughout the film. What did you want them to express?

Light and shadow were very important because they are both nostalgic and cinematic. We wanted to use natural light, the light of sunset, for example, and colors that might bring Japanese viewers back to their childhoods.

The shadow play also belongs to that idea because it exists through the relationship between light and darkness. We carried the same principle into other scenes: Kozue playing with the light and the shadow of her hand in her room, or the silhouettes visible in the school infirmary.

Many of the most beautiful ideas came from the cinematographer and the lighting team. Together, we tried to make light, shadow and darkness part of the film’s language.

The soundtrack also creates a powerful sense of passing time, particularly through the cicadas and motorcycles.

Yes. The sound of the cicadas and the sound of the motorcycle form different layers, and those layers create a sense of time. That was largely the idea of our sound designer, Matsuno-san. Sound does not simply describe the place. It allows us to feel how slowly or quickly time is moving for Kozue.

The film’s poetic form exists alongside difficult social realities, including alcoholism, insecure work and a troubled family. How did you balance those elements?

The film is set in 1995, and I did want it to contain something of Japanese society at that time. One element that remains largely unspoken is that Kozue’s father is suffering from depression. In the 1990s, depression was not discussed in the way it is now. It was treated almost as though it did not exist. People might simply tell you that nothing was wrong and that you should continue working or push through it.

For me, it was important to show how a child sees a father who is depressed, without fully understanding what is happening to him. Alcoholism, meanwhile, is not only a Japanese issue. Having a father or mother with an alcohol problem is something that can happen in any country. The father was partly informed by someone I knew, not a member of my family, but a friend who struggled with alcohol.

Kozue’s feelings toward the young man in the film are difficult to define. Did you think of them as her first experience of love?

When you are a small child and you are drawn to somebody, you do not necessarily know whether it is love or whether you simply like that person. You do not yet have a clear name for the feeling.

What mattered to me was showing how Kozue tries to understand the world through her own small field of vision. That part of the story is also connected to my experience of losing my grandfather during childhood.

Would the story have changed significantly had the central child been a boy rather than a girl?

I was trying to depict a child as a child. I am a man, so I cannot claim that I can describe a girl’s feelings in every detail. But the film was not primarily focused on gender. What interested me was the state of being a child, which I believe is universal.

How did you find Karin, who plays Kozue?

She was chosen through an audition. Many girls came, but Karin immediately stood out. As soon as I saw her, it became very clear to me that I wanted her in front of the camera. There was something very natural about her presence. She was not an experienced film actor, although she had done musical performance. I did not want to rehearse too much or interfere with what was already special about her.

Of course, we worked on movement and the practical requirements of the scenes, but as much as possible, I wanted her simply to exist in front of the camera. She is also very intelligent. She read the screenplay carefully and arrived at the shoot having thought deeply about the role. What she did was not accidental. She had prepared.

Karin and Shinozuka, who plays the young man, have a very delicate chemistry. How did you develop their relationship?

For me, casting was never about whether somebody was famous, highly experienced or successful. I was interested in the chemistry that might emerge between two people.

This was the first film appearance for both Karin and Shinozuka-san. That gave their relationship a freshness. Neither of them stood above the other as a veteran performer. They met on equal terms, respected each other and remained very natural together.

I think that equality created the particular distance and closeness you feel between them in the film. Shinozuka-san himself was also very natural and unadorned. Before the shoot, we spoke several times by telephone about the character, despite his busy schedule. We continued talking about the film even after production had finished. He was deeply committed to it.

The film has a deliberately slow rhythm. What attracts you to slow cinema?

I watch many films with a slow tempo. I do not find them boring. On the contrary, they give us the luxury of experiencing time as it passes slowly. That slowness is a kind of richness. It allows you to notice changes in light, sound, faces and silence that might otherwise disappear.

Did you worry that younger viewers, accustomed to short-form digital media, might find that rhythm difficult?

The film is set in 1995, when there were no smartphones. It was a moment when the analogue world was beginning to transform into the digital one.

Kozue is always watching the adults around her. She has time to observe them because she is not looking at TikTok or at a smartphone.

I feel that many things disappeared with the end of that analogue period. Smartphones and short-form media have taken certain forms of attention away from us. I wanted the film to preserve the experience of looking at people, waiting and allowing time to unfold.

Was it difficult to recreate 1995 while filming in the present?

It was very challenging to eliminate contemporary digital objects. We had to watch carefully for smartphones, electric cars and anything else that would not belong to the period. We checked every setting closely to make sure the world was consistent.

The film has a deeply nostalgic quality. Do you see it as a celebration of nostalgia?

Yes, although I hope it is more than nostalgia for its own sake. It is a way of returning to a form of attention and a sense of time that we may have lost.

How did you experience the film’s reception at an international festival?

I was surprised by the way the audience responded. When the screen went black and Karin’s name appeared, people applauded. In Japan, audiences would usually wait until the very end of the credits before applauding, so this was new to me. I do not know whether it was simply a cultural difference, but it made me very happy.

Then, when my name appeared as the director, they applauded again. It felt almost as though the audience was embracing me. This is not a conventionally commercial film. It has an independent, cinephile quality, so I was nervous about how people would receive it. I am still nervous, but also very excited to see how different audiences respond.

Do you already know what your next film will be?

I do not have a definite plan yet. But visiting the festival and speaking with many people has given me time to think. Perhaps those encounters will lead me toward the next film.

Images courtesy of Karlovy Vary Film Festival Servis.