Goshogaoka

Filmed in a middle school gymnasium in suburban Japan, GOSHOGAOKA takes as its ostensible subject the exercise routines and drills of a girls baskettball team. The film consists of six ten minutes takes, shot with a fixed camera at court level in which the various cadences of chanting voices and bodily movements digress into distinct studies. Taken together they construct a subtle and multi-layered social portrait, a portrait framed within a study of choreographed movement (the routines etc.) and therefore one in which documentary values soon become inseparable from aesthetic ones.