More Japanese filmmakers than before are venturing outside their domestic comfort zone. But few have gone farther, both geographically and culturally, than Yu Kaneko in his documentary “Mlabri in the Woods.”
An associate professor at Tama Art University, Kaneko has published extensively about cultural anthropology and cinema history, and has made documentaries on a range of subjects.
His new film about the Mlabri, an ethnic group living in the hills of Laos and northern Thailand, began with an encounter in Thailand in February 2017 with Yuma Ito, a Japanese linguist fluent in the Mlabri language.