Post-3/11 documentary cinema exhibits an extremely high level of sensitivity to the relationship between filmmakers and their subjects. This was not simply due to political concerns but rather to ethical ones. In the face of victims shattered by devastating sadness after the disaster, filmmakers themselves felt conflicted about where they should stand or how they should behave as the subject of filming. As a result, they had to pause to consider their reasons and motivations for the act of filming itself. Amid such hesitation, what methodologies of filmmaking did post-3/11 filmmakers put into practice? This chapter analyzes the Tohoku Documentary Trilogy (Tohoku kiroku eiga sanbusaku), which consists of The Sound of Waves (Nami no oto, 2011), Voices from the Waves (Nami no koe, 2013), and Storytellers (Utau hito, 2013), and focuses on the directors, Sakai Ko and Hamaguchi Ryusuke, who challenged the boundaries of documentary filmmaking by inventing and executing a new method of interviewing in the films.

A distinct characteristic shared by all three films in the trilogy is that the directors participate onscreen as interviewers and audience members. Without being concerned about the realism typically expected of documentary cinema, which emphasizes objectivity or authenticity, they deliberately push narrativity and fictionality to the forefront, thereby clarifying their stance that their films are not mere recordings of reality but a product of the complicity between the filmmakers and the object being filmed.