feature-length narrative

Everything is Ocean is a highly visual and imaginative feature film centering on a Japanese American artist and performer named Saori (played by Saori Tsukada). The film chronicles her faltering grasp of reality as she navigates a neurological interruption resulting in mysterious bouts of amnesia, dissociative fugues, mutating personas, and blackouts.

Combining moving image, stills, surreal animations and a haunting sound score, Everything is Ocean features Saori along with other downtown New York acting luminaries including Jim Fletcher (from the Wooster Group, New York City Players and ERS). Throughout the film, we witness Saori in various rehearsals and performances, with others or sometimes alone, embodying characters who coalesce or collide with her own unraveling persona. When she encounters old friends or mysterious strangers, intimate scenes play out that are part paranoid fantasy and part performative fever dream. Her behavior becomes increasingly unpredictable – she intermittently bursts into tears, collapses to the ground or floats in a weightless reverie, all seemingly triggered by encounters with water or the natural world.

As the days and seasons blend and time becomes more slippery, the film reveals her mounting disorientation, exposing psychic disruptions, unexplained hallucinatory episodes and supernatural (or alien) disturbances. While exploring various roles and identities, she ruminates on recurring themes – planetary bodies, space missions, black holes, missing person reports – and discovers enigmatic messages and objects in her backyard garden.

Her world is periodically interrupted with ethereal oceanic vistas, sometimes peaceful or dangerous, conveying hidden meanings and deep mysteries – reflecting the dramatic ebb and flow of tidal movements, of being washed ashore, waiting and then being taken out again in a repetitive pull of gravity. She appears to be experiencing an existential anxiety that threatens to black out the entire frame; ruptures in time where she communicates with nature, the sea and entities from an otherworldly, galactic realm. In this rapturous state of whirring electric energy, sounds of the natural world and beyond (birdsong, insects, flowing water, outer space), become a kind of exaggerated extraterrestrial music, tuned to frequencies beyond the range of human hearing.