SCREEN | Swimming Past 'Numakage Public Pool' x DOXA 2026

"Once the pool is gone, it'll be too late."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Numakage Public Pool, director Shingo Ōta's peaceful eighty-minute observational documentary chronicling the eponymous landlocked suburban Tokyo public swimming pool complex's final months of operations, details the much-loved location through its ten-thousand daily patrons, from the elderly, families, and children, as they fight to keep it open against looming urban development.

For fifty-two years, the leisure facility also happened to be one of Japan's best-known cruising spots for gay men in one curious thread exploring its social significance to the local queer community. However, dissembling forces plan for Numakage to be demolished while ignoring the loud oppositional outcry of many Saitama residents as the news generates a deep sense of important loss in the community—emotions typically only reserved after experiencing human death. Ōta structures the nature of grief through Kübler-Ross' five psychological stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Ōta's melancholic but pleasing slice-of-life film acts as a suitable encapsulation of the notoriously reserved greater Japanese culture as a whole. The meaning and purpose behind the municipal pool's everyday utility highlight its act of communal service. As a common shared space, the public oasis brought people together to rejuvenate themselves by swimming alongside one another. Numakage Public Pool's psychological examinations in the place's final days serve as a fine metaphor for the Japanese psyché with the ordinary recreational space acting as a larger cultural hub.

Numakage Public Pool screens at the 2026 DOXA Documentary Film Festival as part of the Spotlight: From One Basin program at the VIFF Centre on May 2nd.


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