By Jeffrey Sipe and Nina rodriguez
Japanese director Kaori Oda’s experiential documentary, “Cenote,” set in Northern Yucatan where sinkholes used to be the sole water source, is a mesmerizing exploration of the Mayan people’s relationship with cenotes, or natural sinkholes. Combining fascinating underwater footage, evocative soundscapes, and interviews with local residents, the film creates a haunting portrait of these mysterious places, which the Mayans believed connected our world to the afterlife. In hallucinatory, turquoise underwater footage, these sinkholes, long-lost memories echo in footage, which creates an entrancing expanse of light and dark. In these sinkholes, director Oda Kaori encounters intriguing shapes, the water heaves, drops fall like razor blades. and beams of light dance in the darkness in a hypnotizing introduction to the film’s central theme, the coalescence of past and present in this magical place.
Oda explores this theme through interviews with local residents, including Mayan elders who remember the cenotes from their childhoods. Their stories are interwoven with footage of the cenotes themselves, creating a sense of continuity between the past and present. The film is careful, however, not to romanticize the past. The Mayans’ relationship with the cenotes was not always peaceful, and some cenotes were used for ritual sacrifices. Oda’s film acknowledges this dark history while also celebrating the cenotes’ natural beauty and spiritual significance.
Oda studied under Béla Tarr in Sarajevo, and she shot a previous film, “Aragane,” in a Bosnian coal mine. She likes to call her work «films,» but for the sake of clarity she sometimes explains that her films are «experimental documentaries.» Far from a conventional talking-head documentary, for instance, there is no narrator in “Cenote.” The film’s structure is loose and meandering, a meditation on the sinkholes’ place in Mayan culture that succeeds in evoking a sense of wonder and mystery. For “Cenote,” she used Super-8 film along with an iPhone X and a bubbling water soundscape, to capture her impressions of a place where, as a ghostly voiceover explains, nothing is forgotten.
Alongside the striking visuals of the subaquatic footage, with the turquoise water creating an otherworldly atmosphere, the film’s sound design turns the film into a truly immersive experience. The sounds of water and the surrounding jungle are a constant presence in the film, reminding us of the cenotes’ essential role in the Mayans’ lives. Intuitive camera movement and editing, with minimal music and sparse instrumentation, add to the film’s ethereal atmosphere.
Parts of the film are accompanied by an evocative voice-over spoken by a girl reciting lines from ancient Mayan poetry that Oda had scripted based on her research. Oda does not speak Spanish, let alone Mayan, and understood only in retrospect a lot of what her interviewees told her during her research. “[T]here was also a lot that I didn’t understand even after I read the transcript . . . many of the myths and legends. Chronology can be elusive, and people often seemed to just suddenly appear. Sometimes people told us stories that worked like these myths, and they were sometimes scary to read.” In this instance, however, maybe the eyes of a foreigner helped forge a truly intuitive experiential meditation that leaves viewers with a deeper appreciation of the cenotes’ beauty and spiritual significance.
“Cenote” had successfully run at the local box office in Japan and has been shown at the Rotterdam Film Festival and at FICUNAM, the International Film Festival of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. It will be screened at Compartimento Cinematografico in San Miguel de Allende at the end of April.
