National Museum of Asian Art Freer Gallery of Art
Jefferson Drive and 12th St., SW
Washington, DC
Followed by a live video Q&A with director Kazuhiro Soda!
Watch the trailer
Beyond the adorable feline antics, this documentary captures the beauty and struggle of life in Ushimado, a coastal Japanese town. A pack of stray cats lives in the local shrine, but their impact on the town drives a wedge in the community. By chronicling the tensions, documentarian Kazuhiro Soda raises questions about our duty to the animals around us. “Soda has made an intimate, complex portrait of not just the cats and their allies but also a community in decline — a community of which he is a recent but concerned member,” writes Mark Schilling of The Japan Times.
(Dir.: Kazuhiro Soda, Japan/United States, 2024, 119 min., DCP, Japanese with English subtitles)
Image courtesy of Asian Shadows
Watch the trailer
Beyond the adorable feline antics, this documentary captures the beauty and struggle of life in Ushimado, a coastal Japanese town. A pack of stray cats lives in the local shrine, but their impact on the town drives a wedge in the community. By chronicling the tensions, documentarian Kazuhiro Soda raises questions about our duty to the animals around us. “Soda has made an intimate, complex portrait of not just the cats and their allies but also a community in decline — a community of which he is a recent but concerned member,” writes Mark Schilling of The Japan Times.
(Dir.: Kazuhiro Soda, Japan/United States, 2024, 119 min., DCP, Japanese with English subtitles)
Image courtesy of Asian Shadows
