Pool is a hybrid film that blends poetic documentary, personal testimony, and symbolic fiction to explore our deep and often conflicted relationship with water. It follows my own journey — a slow, vulnerable attempt to reconnect with water and overcome a long-standing fear of immersion.
The film unfolds through a series of encounters in swimming pools around the world — from private pools in Tokyo to crowded nighttime pools in Barcelona. Each encounter is a portrait, a mirror. Therapists, artists, swimmers, and strangers share their memories, fears, and rituals — revealing how water can awaken vulnerability, trauma, or liberation. These conversations, recorded at the water’s edge, are intimate and unscripted. I listen, observe, and gradually enter the element that once terrified me.
Between these documentary moments, I weave in fragments of daily life, meditative sequences, and poetic interludes. A sophrologist’s voice guides the film like a quiet inner monologue. Yuri Kuroda, a Watsu practitioner, speaks about the healing potential of water. Kyosuke Terada performs beside a pool — a moment that blends music, memory, and physicality into a visceral response to water’s presence.
I’m currently filming in Tokyo as part of a residency at Art Center Ongoing, where real encounters and spontaneous collaborations continue to shape the project — like the ones unfolding here, now.
Shot with a focus on texture, movement, and ambient sound, the film offers an immersive experience — where water becomes more than a setting: it becomes the substance of memory, transformation, and release.
Pools is not just a film about water. It’s a film about fear, the body, and the quiet revolutions that begin just beneath the surface.

Event

May 28th (wed) 19:00
how to swim
Performers:　Fu Sakai & zzzpeaker (music), Frédéric Liver (swimmer)
Entrance: Pay what you wish


June 1st (sun) 19:00
Frédéric Xavier Liver’s farewell party
Admission: 1000 yen (with light catering＋one drink)