The Passage
2018 · 22m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Kitao Sakurai
Genres: adventure, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
Fleeing two enemies, a man receives sudden invitation to an intercultural journey through Asian, African and Nordic rituals and traditions. Participation becomes the price of passage.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The ritual-as-tollbooth premise is genuinely weird—using passage through African, Asian, and Nordic traditions as literal currency for survival—but it feels more like a concept statement than a film that earns its strangeness; the surrealism reads as decorative rather than subversive.
Sakurai constructs something rare: a formally rigorous experimental work that treats cross-cultural ritual not as exotic texture but as structured dramatic architecture, where each ceremonial sequence becomes a formal language the film must learn and move through with genuine contemplation.
The decision to make participation itself the antagonist—not the rituals, but the act of surrender required to pass through them—is what transforms this from festival-circuit ethnography into something that actually breathes; you feel the filmmaker's singular choice in every silent moment of acceptance.