Cenote

Complete first draft written for Screen Slate.

In the span of three features, Kaori Oda has established herself as one of the foremost practitioners of the kind of immersive documentary filmmaking pioneered, at least in part, by the Sensory Ethnography Lab with films like Sweetgrass and Leviathan. Her debut film, Aragane (2015), is one of the most compelling digitally-shot films of the past decade, unfolding mostly in the near-darkness of a Bosnian coal mine and transforming the setting, the workers, and the tools into a disconcerting, wondrous dance of shadows and headlamps. After 2017’s Toward a Common Tenderness, a more personal essay film, Oda’s Cenote (2019) returns to this experimental mode, albeit with significantly more accoutrements. The documentary plunges into the deep, intricate sinkholes in Mexico that give it its name; cenotes were water sources for the Mayans and believed to act as conduits between the world and the afterlife. Today, they still exert a pull on the tropical jungle communities, especially physically; since the pits possess strong, unexpected currents, many people have fallen in and drowned, accidentally or intentionally. That sense of intertwined culture and danger is central to the structure of Oda’s film. Eschewing the strictly observational stance of Aragane, Cenote moves fluidly between modes over the course of its 75 minutes. After an extended opening that features cacophonous, near-abstract flows of water, sunlight, and figures both amphibian and terrestrial, the film alternates between underwater iPhone footage, which glides through the dark channels of numerous different cenotes, and Super-8mm footage of the surrounding communities, observing festivities, cemeteries, and above all faces. Over all of this, voiceover fades in and out, freely mixing interviews with residents, recited lines from ancient Mayan poetry, and scripted lines written by Oda herself. It is well worth noting that Oda serves as cinematographer, editor, and sound designer on her films, and that goes some way in accounting for the immersiveness of her work above and beyond the purportedly minimal concept. For Cenote is in many ways a maximal film, in its sensory affect and evocation of the at-times otherworldly nature of the sinkholes. At the same time, Oda’s ultimate achievement is to situate them in a real, tangible place, in a conception of culture that still manages to accurately reflects the unique blend of happenstance, tradition, and myths that form human experience. Often eerie, sometimes placid, and always beautiful, Cenote never fails to convey the unclassifiable, ever-shifting definitions and meanings that its subject can hold, often immeasurably influenced by a camera and light pointed there, a story told there.