WE-ENTRANCE AND EXIT TO THE WORLD

Surveillance as a State of Mind

Venue(s): Theater Image Forum
From November 29 (Sat), 2025 to December 12, 2025
Language: In Japanese with English subtitles
Official website: kikh.com/en/works/we_movie/
Theater website: www.imageforum.co.jp/theatre/
Theater website: www.imageforum.co.jp/theatre/movies/8928/
Tariff: Please check the theater site.
Advance tickets: ¥1,500 at the theatePlease check the theater site.r
Talk event: Visit theater website for details.

Title: WE – 世界への入口と出口 (We – sekai e no iriguchi to deguchi)
Director: Hiroshi Koike (小池博史)
Duration: TBA

Fusing stagecraft and cinematic imagination, WE – Entrance and Exit to the World transforms director Hiroshi Koike’s acclaimed 2023 multimedia performance into a feature film. Originally presented at Tokyo’s Earth+Gallery, the word-of-mouth sensation was restaged in 2024, and now, live performance has been reinterpreted as cinema. It is screening at Image Forum indefinitely with English subtitles, so if you’re a fan of dance, spoken movement, percussion and video stagings, this is for you.

Set in Japan, 2073, WE imagines a nation stratified into three rigid social classes bound together by the illusion of equality and the omnipresence of mutual surveillance. In this future, everyone watches everyone else, and the state no longer needs to police its citizens; people police themselves. Only one place remains beyond the gaze: Space E, an ungoverned zone whispered about like a rumor. Refugees flee to it seeking liberation, but as memories distort and realities dissolve, the sanctuary slowly reveals its trap. Whether through repression or volition, freedom becomes a mirage—an exit that never opens.

Koike’s direction leans heavily into visual dramaturgy, with elements converging to portray how illusions, lies, and cultural control nest quietly in the human psyche. Rather than worldbuilding through exposition, the film constructs a psychological architecture of surveillance.

Central to this aesthetic is the work of visual artist Wataru Yamakami, winner of both the Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art and the Tokyo Midtown Award. His sculptural environments and immersive textures shape WE’s emotional horizon, operating not as décor but as sentient terrain. Every surface becomes an actor; every contour pressures the performers to move, hesitate, or fracture.

As a film, WE is less a straightforward narrative than a cinematic state of mind—hypnotic, unsettling, and urgent. It asks: What happens when the system no longer oppresses us… because it has already moved inside us?

Theater Image Forum