Zawawa: The Sound of Sugar Cane in the Wind

"Zawawa: The Sound of Sugar Cane in the Wind", is a 50 minute film, in Japanese, English and French versions, co-directed by myself and Rupert Cox, and produced in collaboration with the acoustic scientist Kozo Hiramatsu, Professor Emeritus of Kyoto University, and Atsushi Nishimura, a researcher at the Technical University of Okinawa.

Based on extensive fieldwork on the island of Okinawa, scene of the last battle of World War II, and host to a continued and considerable US military presence, the film was supported by an award from Toyota Environmental Research (Arts).

A number of questions animated this research project:
• Can the orthodoxies of ethnographic film practice be challenged by substituting verbalised testimony with onscreen text, to shift the sensory focus of the audience towards the environmental sounds invoked in that testimony and addressed through unprocessed field recordings?
• Can the parallel tendencies within documentary film to ‘musicalise’ the soundtrack - whether through the addition of non-diegetic composition or through the processing of field recordings - be resisted to strike innovative ratios between the heard and the seen, to subvert expectations of a synchronic relationship between sound and image, and to allow the narratives to be re-orientated towards an auditory resonance?
• Can an exploration with collaborating islanders of their memories of an ostensibly quotidian sound – that of wind-agitated sugar cane – enable new, and auditory-focused perspectives, that allow for a more complex and nuanced account of present sensory experience and past memories?

The film has been shown in the following locations:

2020 Film as Method in the Geo-Humanities, CRASSH.
2020 Salon des écritures alternatives en sciences sociales
Le Mucem (Marseilles).
2020 RAI Film Festival.
2019 Sjøn International Anthropological Festival.
2018 Liminaria, Official Collateral Exhibition of Manifesta 12, Palermo.
2018 37th Jean Rouch International Film Festival, Musée l’Homme, Paris.
2018 Displacements Film Festival (US).
2018 Ethnofest, Athens.
2018 Socio-Sonic Conference, City University, London.
2018 Why Remember?, Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina.
2018 Casca-Cuba, University of Santiago de Cuba.
2018 Ethnografilm, Paris.
2017 Skibbereen Arts Festival (Ireland).
2017 10 Community Centres in Okinawa.