藝術家實驗室

Shingo Ota is a Japanese filmmaker, performer, and director based in Tokyo and Paris. He studied philosophy and narratology at university, where he made his graduation film Graduation, which received the Grand Prize and Audience Award at the Image Forum Festival 2010.

His feature documentary The End of the Special Time We Were Allowed—created in response to the suicide of a close friend—premiered at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in 2013 and was subsequently released in 12 countries. His latest documentary, Numakage Public Pool, examining the disappearance of a beloved public swimming facility in Saitama, has screened at festivals including Busan and Taipei.

Ota's practice moves fluidly between cinema, theatre, and performance. His hybrid documentary-performance work The Last Geishas (Recreation Version) was presented at Festival d’Automne in Paris in 2024 and later toured Indonesia. He also performs in Care and Acting, a stage work investigating the relationship between caregiving and theatrical practice. As an actor, he has collaborated with Toshiki Okada and the theatre company chelfitsch since Five Days in March in 2010. Through his work, Ota explores memory, loss, care, and the social meanings embedded in disappearing places and embodied practices. 

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