Finding a Place of Healing in 'Kono Basho'
Finding a Place of Healing in ‘Kono Basho’
Feature art by Abigail Manaluz
In the afternoon of March 2011, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck northeastern Japan, triggering a series of tsunami waves that claimed thousands of lives and submerged entire communities, including the coastal city of Rikuzentakata.
Visual artist Jaime Pacena II witnessed firsthand how Rikuzentakata responded to the aftermath. “The people were displaced into several micro communities after the 2011 tsunami,” Pacena, who worked in Japan as a curator for over a decade, tells me. “Five years later they were being displaced again back to a more permanent structure.”
Displacement is the invisible force at work in Pacena’s debut feature, Kono Basho. Twenty-eight-year-old Ella (Gabby Padilla), a Filipino anthropologist, travels to Rikuzentakata for her estranged father’s funeral, and meets his second family and her Japanese half-sister, Reina (Arisa Nakano). The two women are removed from the safety of their old lives by this tragic event and must now navigate through their new history, one that is marred by the pains of the past.
Ahead of the film’s premiere in the twentieth edition of the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, I had a short yet illuminating conversation with Pacena and Padilla about Kono Basho and the many ways a geographical place bears witness to the hardest of human experiences.
How is “place,” be it literally or abstractly, embodied in Kono Basho and through its characters?
Pacena: The city of Rikuzentakata is sort of a third character. It seems calm on the surface, but just like the two main characters of the film, it actually holds a lot of grief in relation to past devastating events and how the city is being rebuilt. Spring, when we shot the film, also represented rebirth. With regards to the characters, Ella was put into the very place she was avoiding because it’s where her father lived. Meanwhile, Reina, who grew up in the area, knows that part of her identity is not found in that particular place.
What resonated with you from Ella’s character, and what was your process of trying to understand her and her world?
Padilla: I found it fascinating how Ella’s approach to her grief was learning about Rikuzentakata. She dealt with it very logically, and I think that’s something a pragmatic person would do because emotions are harder to deal with; facts are easier. What Ella does throughout the film is she learns the context of the place she’s thrust into and that helps her make sense of what she’s going through, of why her father loved Rikuzentakata so much, and why he chose it over her. Jay’s (Pacena) archival material also helped. He had a lot of videos and photos of his time in Rikuzentakata, especially when they were rebuilding. That shed a light on the responsibility that we had in telling the story. We’re honoring what the city has been through and hopefully that translates in the film as well.
How did you and Arisa prepare being half-sisters?
Padilla: Because Ella and Reina didn’t really have a relationship nor a history, it worked in a method acting type of way in that Arisa and I were also strangers and meeting for the first time. As we were getting to know each other, our characters were also getting acquainted. And Arisa is such a generous actor on set and a wonderful human being. It was easy to be vulnerable with her.
How did you approach Rikuzentakata’s visual landscape in the film?
Pacena: I wanted to show the city and the emptiness or what was left. I didn’t use Rikuzentakata just as a backdrop because it’s a scenic place. Yes, it’s breathtaking and calm, but it also has depth. That helped me understand how I would like to present Rikuzentakata. Also, as humans sometimes we don’t scream the pain; we just try to breathe in every second of every day to move on.
The film is situated in Japan and contemporary Japanese history, but how does it intersect or intertwine with the Filipino experience?
Pacena: The two main characters illustrate the situation of the Philippines. In a way this is still about the Filipino diaspora, but we’re not talking about the one who left; we’re talking about the child, the one who was abandoned. And at the same time not everyone who goes abroad is able to return because with Ella’s father, he had another family in Japan. Another representation is Ella being half Filipino and half Japanese. In Japan, that’s a very difficult situation to be in. So that’s why Reina’s character is very Japanese because she needs to be one. In these two characters, they embody the different stories of the Filipino diaspora.
What is an aspect or theme of the film that you hope audiences, especially Filipinos, remember after they see it?
Padilla: That healing starts with reaching out. That sometimes when you're stumbling in the dark, you're grasping for something to hold on to, another person is also in the same struggle as you. And when you do reach out and connect, and you find your way out of the tunnel or dark place together, that’s when the healing starts. So as much as the film is about grief, it’s also about rebuilding and connecting.
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It would be remiss to talk about this film without having Arisa Nakano in the conversation. Luckily, the power of technology (and emailing) has granted us the opportunity to hear about Kono Basho from Nakano herself.
What about Kono Basho that moved you and convinced you to partake in it?
Nakano: First, I would like to thank director Jaime Pacena for allowing me to appear in his first feature-length film. I felt that the theme of this film was "reunification of family.” Reina has a sensitive disposition and thinks hard about how her mother, sister, and sister’s child can be happy, even while holding strong feelings inside for her father. I was drawn to the message that there isn’t just one form of family and to the complexity of Reina’s character.
Considering that this is an international project, how did you prepare for your role and working alongside Gabby?
I myself have little experience with encountering disasters and also didn’t know how films were made in the Philippines, so I deliberately didn’t prepare anything special. The only thing that I cared about was the first impression of Gabby when we met for the first time.
What do you hope Filipinos take away from your film?
That words are not that important in the language of reuniting family. In the film, there were many scenes where the sisters understood each other just by looking into each other’s eyes rather than through words.
Kono Basho is an official entry to the 2024 Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, showing in select Ayala Malls cinemas from August 2 to 11.
