Neo Sora ’14 has captured international acclaim with his feature fiction debut “Happyend” (2024). Since its world premiere at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, “Happyend” has garnered significant attention across Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Southeast Asia, sweeping the festival circuit with honors such as the Golden Hanoman Award (Jogja-NETPAC), the Roberto Rossellini Jury Award (Pingyao), the Observation Missions for Asian Cinema Award (Taipei Golden Horse), and the New Age Director Award (Takasaki).
Set in a near-future Tokyo, “Happyend” follows a group of teenage friends as they navigate a society facing increasing surveillance and the looming threat of a massive earthquake. The film also features a haunting score composed by fellow alum Lia Ouyang Rusli ’10, known for their work on A24’s “Problemista” (2023).
The Argus spoke with Sora in Hong Kong during the Asian Film Awards in March 2025—where he was nominated for Best New Director—to discuss his creative process, the impact of his Wesleyan years, the historical and philosophical threads woven into “Happyend,” and the need to build collective power to challenge oppressive systems and imagine alternative futures.
The Argus: How do you normally introduce yourself to people?
Neo Sora: I’m Neo, and I’m a filmmaker, artist, and translator. I say translator, even though recently I haven’t really been doing too much of it. I started doing more translation immediately after graduating Wesleyan because I didn’t really want to make filmmaking my job. Sometimes I would do subtitling. And then every so often, if I get hit up for a film gig that seems interesting and that I could really put my feelings into, I would do it.
Every kind of Japanese crew who wants to shoot in America or New York would ultimately find me at some point. There are so few people who could translate and crew. And then vice versa: If there was an American DP shooting in Japan, I’d go and be their assistant and translator.
A: So, “Happyend.” You started conceiving this project about eight years ago. What was the occasion?
NS: I have my fast answer, which I usually say in these talks and stuff, but to be honest, it’s a lot of different fragments of ideas. I don’t know if Eclectic is still a thing….
A: Yes! And you were the president [at the time].
NS: It’s a little embarrassing, but yeah. It was the venue for all the shows, right? It has a lot of problems, but there’s also something really lovely about an autonomous, student-run space. And those kinds of residences exist also in Japanese universities. When I was starting to think about wanting to make a feature film, I had the genre of juvenile delinquent films in my mind. I really like Taiwanese filmmakers, like Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang. All of them have these juvenile delinquent films, which I really love.
[In] elementary school all the way to high school, I had a group of friends, but there were these particular two friends who were taller than me. And I really looked up to them. I still do. Because of their height, they walked faster, so I would be a little bit behind with my other friends, and, looking at them from the back, I had this image of these two boys walking together. That just has been stuck in my mind ever since. And if you look at all of my past short films or fiction films, everything has two protagonists. There’s something about that that really works for me.
And then the other thing was every year, [the government] keeps telling you in Japan that there’s gonna be a big earthquake—like 90% chance it’ll come within the next 30 years. So at one point I began to think, “Okay, what would Japan be like in 30 years?” But I want to keep the date vague in the film, so I was thinking, “What kind of place would Japan be like in the near future?” But in order to predict the future, you have to know history, and the past, and what’s going on in politics now. That coincided with my interest in earthquakes in Japan, mainly because the Fukushima incident was such an important thing for me. Then I started reading about 1923 when a really big earthquake happened in Japan around Tokyo, which sparked a massacre of zainichi Koreans.
I was getting a haircut one time, and my hair-cutter—he was Japanese but lived in New York—was telling me that one time when they all went to school, two of his friends had stood up all the teachers’ cars. I was like, holy shit. Suddenly, I had this image of the car. [Later it turned out that] they had stood it up [in a] much less cinematic [way than the characters do in my film], but I was like, “Okay I’m just gonna keep this. Pretend I didn’t hear that.” [My thoughts] about the earthquake, and juvenile delinquents…all came together. All those things were swirling around in my mind as I was starting to write it. That’s how it came to be.
A: How did you then synthesize something out of a million thoughts?
NS: That’s the hard part. I think I just started writing. I never considered myself a writer. Because I didn’t have confidence in myself as a writer, I was putting all my confidence in other writers. But at one point, I realized I needed to write for myself to tell the stories that I really wanted to write. And so I think at a certain point when I realized that it can be a film, all these ideas can emerge into one film. It was such a struggle to write. I found a lab program that required [me] to submit the script by a certain deadline, so I just worked towards that. It’s a good structure. You should always find yourself a deadline. The first draft was really weird—much more sprawling and not as tight.
Over the course of doing all these different labs, [I] realized the story that I wanted to make was more about friendship and less about politics and revolution. I refocused the script but still kept the core of this idea of political differences dissolving the friendship. And then you also start to think about the practicality of shooting a little bit, so focusing the story mainly on the school is a good way of doing that.
A: Speaking of the school, I’m just so amazed that, with its demographic, you’re challenging the notion of what it looks like to be Japanese.
NS: The thing is, it’s already like that. We just don’t really see it. If you look at some TV shows here and there, there’s a token black Japanese guy, and sometimes there’s queer [or] trans people represented, but it’s always token, just one person. And something that was really important was using the guise of it being a fiction about the near future, presenting a picture of a class that has a third or half non-Japanese-looking students, and just not saying anything about it, being like, “That’s the reality,” as if that is the way the world is already.
I always bring up the fact that, for example, the actor who plays Tomu is a mix of Senegalese and Japanese, but he’s born and raised in Japan. I was born and raised in America to Japanese parents. Personality wise, culturally, linguistically, he’s way more Japanese than I am, as somebody [who was] brought up in the Japanese schooling system. So it really brings the question: What even is national identity to begin with? There’s actually no way to define it. Am I Japanese because my parents are Japanese? We can take Japanese Americans who’ve never lived in Japan, who don’t speak Japanese, who probably the majority of Japanese people would be like, “They’re very different from us.”
So then, if it’s not related to bloodline, is it just language? But then there are some Japanese people who don’t speak Japanese at all, of course. So you can keep trying to figure out what it is that defines Japaneseness, and you’ll just never get anywhere, really. It’s just a construction of national identity. Of course, the term Japanese and nihonjin probably have existed for a long time, but in the modern sense of what Japanese identity is—the way that I think a lot of people understand it—is mainly based on the nation-state, which has strong echoes of imperialism. [The] 1947 gaikokujin tōroku rei (the Foreigner Registration Act) made the subjects of the former Japanese colonies into foreigners…or as [the U.S.-led occupation] defines it, a deportable category of people.
But an increase in people, an increase in tourism, all these things make the xenophobia even stronger. Japan has basically always been a diverse place; there’s never been racial purity in Japan. Japanese people as we know it today are a mix of Yayoi people who kind of came in from the Korean peninsula with Chinese and Korean origin, and then the Jōmon people. The education and brainwashing of this identity of Japan as this nation-state that has always existed has a strong grip over Japan. Very few people even question that. But before the Meiji era, I think the difference between what we call prefectures now was as strong as what we consider different nation-states today. Then the modernization during the Meiji era caused [them] to unify. I think it’s a really important project for me to question and push back against the existence of this Japanese identity that a lot of people want to think of as an objective thing, whereas I think it’s a fiction.
A: So with all that history and social issues you want to unpack, why use film as the medium?
NS: Well, I think it’s mainly because that’s the medium that I have the most practice in. I think there are different ideas that are best captured through different mediums. There are certain ideas that you could only really do novelistically. But for me, because the core of the film was the emotion that I was feeling around friendship, differences in politics, and drifting away from someone that you thought was rock solid; all those feelings and emotional truth…seemed to really work as a cinematic story. But I think if I could do it with music, I would. But I can’t.
A: Speaking of music, the music in this film is also so interesting. Is there a reason why music is such an important motif in the film?
NS: I have one particular friend that I think about. Being interested in music that other people are not necessarily interested in brought us together. I guess Wesleyan is filled with people like that. But, eventually, political differences pushed us apart. [This] was an easy way to structure the conflict between Yuta and Kou, to show that Yuta wants to stay in this bubble that brought them together—friendship and music—whereas Kou wants to start to step out into the world and engage with wider society.
Though, of course, in reality, music and politics go hand-in-hand. When you think about these autonomously run spaces at Wesleyan or otherwise, setting up shows and stuff—that’s how hip hop started. That’s how techno started. These people are doing what essentially is direct action, occupying these spaces for music. It’s very political. Yuta is also a very political figure; he naturally defies authority and engages in direct action. And that’s a really different way of engaging politically than what Kou does, which is appealing to power and protest. Arguably, by appealing to power, you are validating power more in a way as well. All of that sets up an interesting dialectic.
A: I love your framing of music as direct action, as resistance, as political and radical. Do you feel like that’s something that Wesleyan has taught you? How has Wesleyan left a mark on you?
NS: Of course, Wesleyan was kind of the intellectual foundation for that. But it just so happened that while I was forming these intellectual foundations at Wesleyan at the same time, stuff was happening outside of Wesleyan, like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Fukushima. I think experiencing both at the same time really built who I am and, more than the school and the academics, it’s growing politically with all the people at Wesleyan—the students who surrounded me—which is maybe the most important thing.
To be honest, there are a lot of issues [with] Wesleyan, but the fact that students have so much autonomy to set up shows—especially seeing what universities are like in Japan right now—the fact that the students do get a lot of autonomy to do things is great, and you learn a lot from having control over spaces, and that should not be surveilled.
So I think it’s quite necessary to present a vision of direct action in Japan, that it is an option to intentionally say “You know what? I’m not going to listen to the rules. I’m going to just do the thing that I want.” Because one of the ways fascism exists in Japan is inside, through education: People are really brought up to follow rules, to always ask for approval beforehand and assume that you need to ask for approval from some higher authority before you can do something. And there’s no muscle to just do it or break the rules if you feel morally inclined to. That kind of calisthenics just really doesn’t exist, at least in my perspective of Japan. The easiest examples are, like, no matter how late at night, [and] how few cars are coming, if it’s a red light, no one crosses.
If you do go to protests—even though protests are legally allowed—you’re making a nuisance, no matter how valid your reasons are. People would say, “I understand, and I totally agree with you about your position, but don’t do it so loud.” And I think that kind of thinking makes its way into every strata within human behavior and society in Japan.
That’s not how it was before; in the ’60s and ’70s, it wasn’t like that. There was a lot more autonomy by Japanese people, especially after the war. People were building barracks and doing everything to survive. After the ’60s and ’70s, the government, especially the LDP Kishi [Nobusuke], thought it was like an extreme danger to give students this much autonomy. There was a [concerted] effort to really shift education in order to breed fascism from within, in a way. [Students] are made to police one another. You see these kids who enter first grade, and they’re super unique and free, and they have so much personality, and then over the course of one year, they begin to check the shoe boxes of the other students [to see] if [they’re] aligned perfectly and correcting the other students who are not in line properly. That’s where it starts—this kind of inherited fascism—and it’s kind of scary. That kind of thing really makes its way into adulthood and beyond. That is the fascism of Japan in large part.
That’s why I wanted to present a vision of rebelliousness. And I think what America is really great at teaching you is that actually morality and legality are not the same thing, because every stage of American society has extremely immoral laws that became repealed through collective action. That’s just the way it works everywhere in the world, this kind of defying authority, repealing laws on the ground of moral righteousness. All these things seem to not really exist in Asia in large part, or East Asia, although I would say Korea really shows up. I think that’s because Korea experienced these social movements that are successful, and people are really good at inheriting those stories, and seeing that history, and seeing the necessity of that, like the Gwangju massacre. All these things that are told through cinema and stories and books and verbal history.
I think that’s the power that stories and fiction and cinema [have]: presenting a reality that could be. In the case of “Happyend,” I think one of the things that I wanted to do was present a reality to Japanese audiences that actually you can rebel, and you can defy authority if you want to. It will come with a lot of heartbreak and difficulty; political consciousness and awakening also comes with so much heartbreak. Politics break people apart sometimes, but you can still think that maybe somewhere down the line, they’ll remember each other and talk to each other and reconnect. [That’s why for] the ending of “Happyend,” I wanted to keep it a little bit hopeful, even though you feel the heartbreak, because I still think [with] all the friends that I don’t really speak to anymore, there is a possibility that I’ll rekindle relationships in the future, as long as we’re all still alive.
A: That’s beautiful. I heard from an alum who watched “Happyend” and said, “Oh, this feels like a Wesleyan film.” You also talked about morality just now. How have your philosophy major and the classes you’ve taken in philosophy informed or transformed your thinking?
NS: I did a lot. I did feminist ethics with [Associate Professor of Philosophy] Elise Springer, who inspired me as well—reading speech action with Judith Butler, and Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto.” All these texts that Elise showed me have stayed with me for a long time, still. So, yeah, I guess in that sense, Wesleyan did really help, but it’s really just the specific professors that just are really, really good. I think having the philosophy department to ground me was really helpful.
At the time, actually, the film department was something that I was rebelling against. But honestly, I’m really glad now, looking back on it, that it did give me the foundation of formalist thinking of cinema, because it’s really helped me in the craft. So I wish I took it more seriously, but at the time, the film department had so much status and I didn’t like that. It was good as a target against which I rebelled. And then I had philosophy to go back to think through my ideas.
A: With all of that, how did you bring that to the Japanese audience, and how was that received, in Japan and elsewhere?
NS: In Japan, the reception was pretty good for a first-time independent film. I don’t really read the Japanese version of Letterboxd—called Filmarks—it can be pretty vile sometimes, so I intentionally don’t read it at all. It’s kind of hard for me to gauge what the actual reception was other than the people who come up to you after the screenings to talk to you. But, generally speaking, people who come up to you to talk liked the film. If you are like one of the rare people who protest or rebel in Japan, then it seems like the film really worked. And then also a lot of ethnically non-Japanese Japanese people came up to me and thanked me. There was one zainichi Korean writer who wrote a review about how much it worked on them, so I think it’s reaching the right people. For the people for whom it really works, it really touched them, and that makes me really happy.
But to see the passion with which Hong Kongers have been responding to the film, it’s on a different level. So I think there is some societal difference between a country where there was a massive student movement and [where there was] not. I think to have a student movement that is as massive as it was here really means that every single person, directly or indirectly, engages in similar kinds of ideas of authoritarianism and protest. So I think, in that sense, the ideas that are present in the film probably resonate much further with a larger swath of the audience here, which is why the reaction is so much bigger, whereas in Japan, there just aren’t that many people who have ever joined a movement.
A: I’m thinking of The Argus’ American readers. Do you have any words for them, or for students in today’s America?
NS: It’s kind of unrelated to the film, but from my experience of being part of leftist scenes in at least New York and then going to Japan, I think there is an Americanness that pervades social movements within the U.S. that is not very good for movement building. I think there can be a really horrible sense of intellectuals, leftists, looking down upon people who don’t get their ideas immediately. There’s a [sense of] moral purity. Of course that exists in Japan as well, but I think it exists in America to a different degree, like the “I am more radical than thou” type of mentality.
We’re not at a place where that is sustainable, because we need to build power to be able to fight against an extremely coordinated and organized right that has also the backing of the most resources the planet has ever seen, militarily and financially. Otherwise, how can we live together, and how can we survive this fascist oligarchical apocalypse that we’re living in? We can’t. We’re just gonna lose, and we won’t have the planet to live on anymore.
Actual coalition building and actual work on the ground requires you to engage with people who didn’t have the privilege of having a higher education [and] don’t have the privilege of reading theory if they’re working. I’m really guilty for not doing it enough either. But, it’s important to be on the ground, talk to people in a real way, understand what people’s needs are, try to help each other fulfill those needs, and not judge people if they don’t immediately get something.
This applies for any other thing, but if we are very serious about helping with the liberation of Palestine, then I think we need to build really broad coalitions as much as possible. Regardless of if we agree with each other’s ideologies 100%, we just need to keep working on building those connections and building collective power.
[For] basically any other massive student movement, it would not have been possible if they did not have a collective base of support. I’ve been talking a lot to these ’60s–’70s student protesters, activists, and they all talked of the importance of broad public support as the biggest takeaway from that era. What they say is, when we would be fighting the police on the street with sticks, normal people who were living in the neighborhoods near the streets, they all supported the students. And so when they ran away from the police, everyone was bringing them into their house and making sure that they were protected and out of the sight of the police.
A: Do you have any words for artists at Wesleyan, especially international students who might feel like it’s more challenging to build a career?
NS: I think it’s really difficult, especially in America where basic needs are not met. If you want to meet your basic needs, it’s really expensive. I’m really lucky. I’m privileged economically, and also privileged with having great friends and with having citizenship in America but also Japan. I’m afforded all these privileges, so I can’t ignore that when thinking about how I was able to concentrate on filmmaking.
But also, [realize] that America is not necessarily the only place you can be to make your art. As shitty as Japan can be, it does have universal health care. I think there’s a hustle culture in America where, if you really want to make it, you have to work and then hustle, and then use all the spare time you have to put into your artistic practice. To be honest, I think most people who make it have help or resources.
There’s a romantic view of a struggling artist, but actually, if you’re struggling, it’s hard to make art. Of course, struggle can be a really important inspiration and motivation to make art. But if all you’re doing is dealing with your mental health [and] meeting necessities or financial problems, it’s gonna be really hard to concentrate on the art work, so [be] really aware of that. If you are in that situation, it’s okay that you can’t make the work right now. Don’t be hard on yourself.
One of the ways to overcome that is to find a community who can really support you, find friends who can really support you, and you can support them as well. If you want to stay in America, figure out some kind of living situation with your community members, and they’ll make it cheaper to live, and help each other with food. I think those kinds of basic things are really necessary to be able to concentrate on your work.
A: Thank you. Some last questions: What have you been watching or reading?
NS: After I lost hope in film, the industry, and art in general for a while, what gave me back hope was listening to this lecture by Refaat Alareer, but also watching films by Elia Suleiman, the Palestinian director. His films are great, and they’re funny. The fact that you can have humor while living in occupied Palestine is really something. You sense a lot of resilience from that.
I tried watching a lot of these new movies that came out [in the last] two years, like “The Zone of Interest” and “Dune,” and all I could think about while watching them was Palestine. I just couldn’t really take movies that have too much violence in them anymore. The movies that I ended up really liking were very gentle movies. “Fallen Leaves” by Aki Kaurismäki was a film that I felt like I really needed at the time when I watched it. Right now I’m in a place where I’m in need of earnestness and generosity and kindness. With the state of the world, I think a lot of people are in need of that.
A: And you’re giving me that just by talking and with your film. Like a gentle hug.
NS: Yeah, we all need a big hug.
A: Are you working on any upcoming projects?
NS: I’m working on a couple of scripts, but it’s all too early. I still don’t know what they’re gonna be, but I think it’ll have humor.
A: Any final things you want to say to the Wes kids, Wes people, or the administration?
NS: Free Palestine, and divest from Israel.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“Happyend” is scheduled for release in the United States on June 20, 2025, and is slated to screen at the Wesleyan Film Series this fall.
Haruka Kumagai contributed reporting.
Sida Chu can be reached at schu@wesleyan.edu.
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