In Japan, people can vanish without a trace with the help of so-called “night moving” companies, which help people to disappear from their current lives. Known as the Johatsu, or “the evaporated,” these people leave everything behind to start a new life somewhere else.
The film Johatsu – Into Thin Air (WT), produced by co-director Andreas Hartmann for Ossa Film and currently in post-production, sets out to investigate the subject. The film is co-directed with Arata Mori.
“I encountered this phenomenon and the existence of these companies when I was living in Japan in 2014 and 2016,” Hartmann explained. “And from the beginning I was kind of very fascinated with this idea of the possibility to restart your life, but also very intrigued about the consequences of leaving everything behind. So when I partnered up with my colleague Arata Mori, we decided to tell the story from several perspectives, from the perspectives of the disappeared and the perspectives [of those] left behind, as well as the industry created around this phenomenon.”
In the film, when his family business goes bankrupt, Sugimoto cannot bear the mounting debts and the shame they pile on his family. Hiding away from debt collectors, Sugimoto meets a “night mover” named Saita.
With the support of a night-moving company, an anonymous couple hides day and night from their blackmailing boss in a love hotel in the remote Japanese countryside.
Goto, meanwhile, is a single mother searching for her missing son, who struggles to get any support from the local police due to Japan’s Data Protection Laws. She turns to a private detective, Kudo, who tracks down “the evaporated” for his clients.
“We are diving into a kind of very specific, unique underground world in Japan, but at the same time we found very touching universal individual stories of our protagonists. And we followed the protagonists over a time period of four years,” Hartmann explained. “And the music is also a German Japanese collaboration between a German electronic musician and a Japanese percussionist. The film is 85 minutes long and we are currently working on a 52 minutes TV version. And just this morning we got a go from a national theoretical distributor, Real Fiction, who will be on board for this project.”
Hartmann was in Leipzig in search of world sales representation for the film that will be ready for world premiere in January 2024. He further revealed that the film will not be released in Japan. “This was also a long process of getting to know the protagonists and we have with them a special agreement,” he said. “Of course, they’re aware of the risk [of their identities being revealed], but they decided to participate as, for them, it was also an opportunity to share the story and to speak out.”
