In 2017, playwright Marco Canale staged a play called La velocidad de la luz (“The Speed of Light”) in the Villa 31 slum. There, a group of indigenous elderly ladies recovered their traditions in order to explore their bonds with modern culture, religion, politics and their own memories. Three years later, Canale replicated the idea in Japan and structured this film, together with Juan Fernández Gebauer and Ignacio Ragone, that revolves around that experience. Noh tells the life of Chiyoko, a widow who tries to save her noh theater –a performing art based on stories of spirits that loiter in other worlds– while she actively participates in the Argentine director’s play. Between rehearsals and performances, she meets another woman and embarks on a trip to find the area where this ancestral practice was born centuries ago. The result is a film that wanders between documentary and fiction, between East and West and, like its central piece, between the living and the dead.
