by Blake Simons
What does it mean to you when the lights dim and the screen lights up? Filmmakers and writers have long probed this question, but few feel it in their core quite like the people who open the doors and set the reels in motion. Inspired by the memoirs of independent film exhibitor Takuo Honda, BAUS: The Ship’s Voyage Continues (2025) recounts the history of the BAUS Theatre in Tokyo. Tracing the venue’s history in vignettes, from Honda’s grandfather in 1927 through to the cinema’s closure in 2014, the film is a layered celebration of exhibition and audience.
BAUS: The Ship’s Voyage Continues was originally conceived by Shinji Aoyama (1964-2022). An internationally-underappreciated master of contemplative, character-driven cinema, his filmography is, at the time of writing, largely out-of-print and unavailable in the West. He is best-known internationally for Eureka (2000), a soulful and subdued three-hour forty-minute drama about the ripple effects of a bus hijacking on three passengers’ lives. Other feature credits include My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? (2005) and Sad Vacation (2007).
Sora Hokimoto studied under Shinji Aoyama at Tama Art University and steered his mentor’s final project to posthumous completion, rewriting its screenplay and stepping into the role of director. Hokimoto’s sophomore feature—following the Aoyama-produced art film Haruneko (2016)—BAUS sees an emerging filmmaker examine his medium’s early history and the legacy of his forebears.
I sat down with Hokimoto at Nippon Connection in Frankfurt, oceans away from the domestic cinema history that underpins his film. And yet, this festival was the perfect site for BAUS’s international premiere. Volunteer-run and community-driven, Nippon Connection understands more than most festivals that if you build it, they will come.
In this illuminating conversation, Hokimoto remembers Aoyama as a filmmaker and lecturer, recalls the challenges in finishing what his teacher had started, and explores how his film’s paean to independent film exhibition resonates all the more urgently in Japan’s current cinema landscape.
You studied under the late, great filmmaker Shinji Aoyama. Could you tell me about that experience and your perception of him as a filmmaker and as a person?
Sora Hokimoto: Aoyama-san taught film at Tama Art University. As a student there, I took one of his classes. One assignment he set was to make a movie of around forty minutes in length. During that process, Aoyama joined in himself – as a cast member and as a co-director. It was a great experience to observe him in action as part of that process.
The question that arose was: why forty minutes? It’s hard to tell a complete story within forty minutes. Aoyama-san compared it to an album. If you play one side of a record, it takes forty minutes. If you turn it around, another forty minutes – you have eighty minutes. Do it again, 100 minutes, 140 minutes. It’s exactly like a film. To listen to an album is to experience a story, and this is a notion that Aoyama wanted us to understand through practice.
This project was originally set to be directed by Aoyama before he sadly passed away. How did it arrive with you?
The script was almost finished, and we were nearing the start of production. I was already part of the team. Six months after Aoyama’s passing, I became the director.
It took about two years to reenvisage the film. I rewrote the script. My thought process was initially driven by “What would Aoyama have written?”. A lot of the script that he left behind was quite ambiguous. There came a point where I resolved to make my own decisions. I tried hard to move forward with clear decisions and a clear mindset.
What did you think of the memoir that this film is based on when you first read it? It feels poignant to take a book about film and adapt it into the medium that it’s a love letter to.
I thought it was very skillfully written, but it left me quite anxious. The scenes didn’t really have much of a flow between them, and they seemed rather disconnected. But there was a clear throughline. What the book seemed to be defined by was death – from the closure of the cinema, to people’s deaths during the war.
The film starts with the protagonist discovering film in 1927, and so it equally depicts the beginning and the end. Someone’s death is an important event that occurs in the film, but it’s depicted straightforwardly and naturally. I felt it was important that I get that right.
This film is highly stylised, with theatrical lighting and sets constructed partially from cardboard. Could you tell me about your stylistic approach in this film?
There are some scenes in the film where the set is designed just like a theatre stage. An old man looks at his family photo and reflects on his parents’ past, and the film goes back in time. When we recount our lives to someone, we line up our memorable moments—our memories are fragmented. To put it in theatre terms, it’s like a spotlight. Sometimes, we forget what happens at the end of the play. At the end of the day, our narratives—and history itself—are made up of those fragments. So I stood my ground, and intentionally made the design and lighting in the past sequences mirror the way we recall our own memories.
This is a time when many of Japan’s mini theatres are struggling. How do you feel about releasing this film at this moment within that landscape? It feels poignant to do so.
Cinema is facing a difficult situation today, and I didn’t want to close this film with a nostalgic sentiment. There have been many films about cinema, and they convey their love of the cinema site through the film. Even though the cinema in question is closed, the nostalgia for it will be passed down through the generations. I wanted to show that, even when the cinema is closed, the will that was cultivated there will go on—even when the place itself is gone, something new can flourish. I produced and directed this film because I wanted to confirm that fact to myself.
Even when the cinema is gone, the lives of the people who worked there and the people who came to see films there continue. If those people take action, the will of the cinema will be passed down, and roll on endlessly.
With thanks to Nippon Connection Festival for facilitating this conversation, festival interpreter Keiko Den for translating, and Yuki Fujiwara for additional translation.
Blake Simons is a film journalist and programmer with a taste for the self-reflexive, sentimental and surreal. Specializing in contemporary Japanese and queer cinemas, they enjoy speaking with artists about what makes them and their films tick. You can find their writing at BFI, IndieWire, The Film Stage, ScreenAnarchy, and other sites of interest. They are artistic director of the London International Fantastic Film Festival. Follow their work here.
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