EXCLUSIVE: Dartmouth Films has taken UK and Ireland rights to UK director Katharine Round’s new Japanese-set feature documentary Ghost Town.
The film, which has its world premiere at Visions du Réel next week, will receive a theatrical release this autumn.
Ghost Town is set in Kamaishi, a town that experienced devastating loss during the 2011 tsunami. The director was inspired to make the documentary after reading a newspaper article about taxi drivers picking up passengers who turned out not to exist.
In the film, she records a series of nighttime taxi journeys, many with an eerie feel. Passengers share intimate stories and reflections about their dreams, their experiences of loss during the tsunami, their families and their aspirations.
One of Round’s key collaborators was Japanese journalist and filmmaker Shiori Ito, director of 2024’s Black Box Diaries, who served as an advisor and interpreter, and also appears on camera as an out-of-town visitor who, in Round’s words, “illuminates unspoken traumas”.
The UK outfit previously worked with Round on her 2015 feature The Divide, which she produced alongside Dartmouth founder and managing director Christopher Hird. That film, which showed the effects of the growing wealth gap between haves and have-nots in UK and US society, was released in the UK by Dartmouth and later picked up by Netflix.
Matt Hird, head of distribution at Dartmouth Films, said of the new acquisition: “I just loved the mysteriousness of Ghost Town. Katharine has always had a great aesthetic – an amazing eye for cinematography and visuals.”
Dartmouth did the deal directly with the filmmakers. Round and her producing partners are hoping to secure a sales agent in the coming weeks.
Other current and upcoming titles on the Dartmouth slate include McCartney: The Hunt For The Lost Bass; Vincent Munier’s natural history documentary Whispers In The Woods; North Sea – Nature Untamed, due for release in September; and Gillian Mosely’s Planet Israel, about generational trauma in Israel and how that relates to the Palestine-Israel conflict.
“We do have a lot of projects coming in and that is very positive,” Hird commented.
Ghost Town was made with backing from University College London, Tohoku University, Al Jazeera English and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.
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