There’s a moment in almost every Rikiya Imaizumi film where nothing happens — and yet you can’t look away.
Two people sit in a convenience store. One says something completely unrelated to what the other just said. They both keep talking. The conversation goes nowhere. And somehow, by the end of the scene, you understand exactly who these people are to each other.
That’s slow cinema. And as a filmmaker, it’s changed how I think about storytelling entirely.
What Is Slow Cinema?
Slow cinema is a filmmaking approach that rejects plot as the primary engine of a film. There are no major twists, no escalating conflicts, no dramatic revelations designed to keep you hooked. Instead, the camera stays long, the editing stays quiet, and the film trusts the audience to find meaning in duration itself.
But slow cinema isn’t just about pacing. At its core, it’s about what replaces plot: human interaction in real time.
Characters Over Events
In conventional commercial filmmaking, the formula is familiar: event → conflict → turning point → climax. The story pulls you forward through what happens next.
Imaizumi inverts this completely. Nothing of consequence happens. No one’s life changes dramatically. The entire film’s tension — and it is tense, in its own quiet way — comes from watching ordinary people interact up close, in real time, over small things.
All emotion, all relationship dynamics, all character — it surfaces through how people speak to each other, how they avoid certain topics, how they respond to a throwaway comment. The film is the interaction. The interaction is the story.
The Power of Everyday Settings
Slow cinema lives in the most unremarkable places: a cheap apartment, a bar neither person really wanted to go to, a convenience store at 11pm, a train platform, a riverside path.
These settings matter. They signal to the audience: nothing special is going to happen here. This is ordinary life. And then, inside that ordinary life, something small and strange and true slips through.
Finding the Dissonance
Here’s where slow cinema gets interesting — and where I think a lot of people misread it as “nothing happening.”
The real craft is finding micro-dissonances inside ordinary interaction. Two people talking where neither is really responding to what the other said. An emotional moment met with complete flatness. A strange, irrelevant action in the middle of a charged scene.
These small wrongnesses — moments where behavior doesn’t quite match what we’d expect — create a specific kind of tension. Not dramatic tension. Something more uncomfortable and more honest: the tension of recognising real human behaviour.
People in Imaizumi films are bad at their feelings. They say the wrong thing at the right moment. They’re oblivious to what’s obvious to the viewer. They waste time on things that don’t matter. They’re funny without meaning to be.
That’s not a weakness in the writing. That’s the whole point.
How the Camera Supports This
Slow cinema’s visual language is built to protect these moments, not punctuate them.
Long fixed takes keep both people in frame together — you watch the whole interaction, not a series of close-up reactions the editor has already decided how to read. No musical score tells you how to feel. The ambient sound of a convenience store, or passing traffic, or the silence between sentences, fills in what music would otherwise smooth over.
The effect is that small things become large. A pause after a question. A glance away. The moment someone picks up their phone to avoid saying something real.
When you slow down, you see more.
Why This Matters for Independent Filmmakers
I make short films with small crews, real locations, and available light. Slow cinema isn’t an aesthetic choice I made — it’s the natural outcome of working that way.
When you strip away the budget for spectacle, for effects, for elaborate plot machinery, what you’re left with is people. And if you’re willing to let the camera stay on people long enough, they show you something true.
The films I’m most drawn to — and the ones I try to make — aren’t about what happens. They’re about the texture of how people exist alongside each other. The awkwardness, the warmth, the things left unsaid.
Slow cinema taught me that restraint is a filmmaking tool. Silence is a choice. Duration is an argument.
And sometimes the most cinematic thing you can do is hold the shot, and wait.
Donny Dong is an independent filmmaker and cinematographer based in Adelaide, Australia. His work spans narrative short films and observational documentary.