Stir Q&A: VIFF Immersed's Randall Okita talks about virtual world of The Book of Distance
The writer-director uses handmade art and high tech to tell the true story of his grandfather and Japanese internment.
The Book of Distance recounts a tale of imprisonment via a virtual-reality tour through memories and artifacts.
The Book Of Distance is now available for free on Steam, Oculus, and Viveport stores.
VIRTUAL REALITY, mixed reality, and augmented reality: they all fall under the booming category of XR--a field that represents one of the most exciting frontiers in the film industry. And B.C. happens to be a thriving centre for it, home to the second largest XR scene on the planet.
Look no further than Randall Okita’s deeply moving The Book of Distance, produced with the NFB—one of the richest and most artful experiences in the VIFF Immersed exhibition.
It follows the filmmaker as he retraces the steps of his grandfather, Yonezo, starting with leaving his home of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1935, then facing racism and imprisonment in Canada.
The personal storytelling weaves in a visually layered world: the family’s real 2D documents and photos, handcrafted sets inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, mechanical sculpture, and animated memory sequences, always with a virtual Randall by our side.
It’s just been released to the public for free on Steam, Oculus, and Viveport stores. (The headsets and controllers suited for the experience are HTC Vive / Vive 1.0 with X2 associated controllers (Vive Wands), and Oculus Rift S / Rift with X2 touch controllers, x2 Sensors [if using an original Rift]).
Stir talked to the filmmaker, a former longtime Vancouverite, in Toronto.
Stir: Again and again when I speak to descendants of those who were interned, they use the phrase “shikata ga nai”, or “it can’t be helped”. They say they were told that a lot when they would ask questions about what their grandparents went through. Was there this wall of silence around it when you were growing up?
Director Randall Okita
Okita: Yeah there absolutely was. I know that phrase well and there certainly was a wall of silence. But what’s interesting as I grow older and do this kind of work—thinking about it and doing the research and seeking out family members in Japan who we lost touch with because of the consequences of the war—it was almost more of an absence. Because I didn't know that the wall was there.
It was only as an adult that you realize what was not being talked about. I wasn't saying, “Grandma, Grandpa: what happened?” It was so absent that I didn't even know that this had occurred until I was in high school.
And it was only as I grew up that I realized how strange it was for my grandparents to not speak their first language to their son. My father doesn’t speak any Japanese because they decided to speak to him only in English—even though my grandfather’s English was a second language. So it was this attitude and how it sort of pervaded things.
That's why I say in the piece that it becomes an unspoken understanding of your cultural heritage. So for me, I didn't realize till much later that, even though my grandparents spoke Japanese to each other in the house, when we went to the grocery store they would speak broken English to each other. And as a child, you don’t process that logically, but you realize, “Okay, the Japanese part of us is kind of not for public consumption. It’s kind of an inside thing.”
So when and how did you decide you wanted to dig into this?
For me this story has always been something I wanted to explore, increasingly, as I learned more about the experience that my grandparents went through. And it wasn’t until I started experimenting with this medium of virtual reality that this sort of match announced itself as a good place to experiment. And those experiments led to The Book of Distance.
Randall Okita drew on real documents and photos that had been kept by his family.
Why is that? What did you like about VR for telling that story?
I liked the ability to ask questions, the ability to create a space and a language of situation. So for us there's sort of two styles that are involved in the piece. One is the archival stream, so there are the photographs you can take in the piece, there are documents, letters, and government notices that you can grab, that you can look at. And those are scanned; they’re real archival documents that have been found in shoeboxes in the attic and they’re pictures that have survived over the years.
And then there's this other language that we use visually and spatially in the piece. I would call it the language of imagination. It's done in the style of a kind of magical, minimalist theatre. So you can see that it’s built, you can see handpainted sets, you can see mechanical effects that virtual Randall pushes in front of you. And that shows you I don’t know exactly what this looked like. For me that was important because I wanted to invite the audience a) to understand that I was trying to find some things that had been lost and b) I wanted to invite them to imagine that journey with that.
So in a medium like this, this piece is very much about inviting the audience to imagine: What could it have looked like? What did it feel like? How were they standing when they got this news? And that kind of became a big part of our drive. And one of the many incredible things for me was you can take that effect further. What did it sound like? How far was he from her? There's this scene where my grandfather has left Hiroshima and he’s arriving in Vancouver. What was the moment that he first saw my grandmother? How far away was she on the pier? She’s waving—of course that's not probably how it happened—but it’s to invite the viewer to witness that moment. And then we follow their story to the next steps. What was it like to build a home together? To clear the land, to start a farm?
The Book of Distance allows Randall Okita and his audience to relive darker moments in his grandparents’ story.
So it seems like it was important to you not to just build a digital virtual world for that imagined history but to humanize it by hand-building some aspects of it?
We had an incredible group of artists, real collaborators. It’s very important in the digital medium to really allow people’s fingerprints to show through and to remind ourselves that perfection was not the goal. And to show people that when you handpaint objects, your brain recognizes the work of an artist and that this was created, and that was an important part of the impression that we wanted to keep front and centre. We didn't want to hide our pencil marks.
This is important when contextualizing historical events, to really keep in mind that there’s always an interpretation going on. There’s me trying to imagine my family in Japan…and we are pulling from the language of Japanese woodblock print and contemporary western modern/impressionistic/minimalist theatre. And that’s important because you're being immersed in a world that is constructed, and it has a tone, it has a magic.
You put yourself in there at our side, taking us through some of the darker moments but also grounding it in the fact that it is being told from your perspective. Tell me a little about that decision.
It was to anchor the viewer in the idea that this is part of my journey to recover what was lost--to understand what happened but also to understand what might have been erased or manipulated or unsaid. I wanted to be clear that this was me figuring it out and to invite the audience to be part of that reckoning--because there’s so much that we can’t know…
…that will stay lost?
Yes, and I think acknowledging that doesn’t make a story less true. In fact I think it makes it more true to acknowledge the human factor in understanding ourselves and understanding our past as opposed to being authoritative about what happened.
You know, I think in many ways retelling is reliving what happened. One of our ideas that developed is that engaging with our history isn’t about memorization. Memorization is a flat object whereas a life is alive and immersive and evolving.
Where do you see people being able to access this beyond VIFF? I notice this will eventually be available through Steam and other platforms people have at home. And it feels like this could really be seen widely.
I can say my dream is to have it released widely. We’re talking to museums and schools and libraries. Working with the [National] Film Board has also been great. At home or in a library, it's still an audience of one at a time when you're in the headset. I love that about it. It's so intimate.
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