Beneath the Surface
Filmmaker Rio Oshiro is uncovering the quiet threads that connect people, purpose, and place
BY Claire Billingsley
Before the camera ever starts rolling, Rio Oshiro is listening. Not for the polished answer. Not for the rehearsed version. Not even for the story someone thinks they want to tell. He's listening for what lives underneath.
“That means building a relationship with [the subject] and getting to know them on a deeper level,” Oshiro says. “When it’s time to film, I intentionally capture specific moments for the viewer, but there are also times when I need to step back and observe the authentic moments as they happen.”
It’s a philosophy that sits at the heart of Undercurrent Film Co., the Greenville-based production company Oshiro launched in 2021, and one that feels especially visible in his latest documentary, The Soil Remembers—a film centered on purpose, stewardship, and the healing power of food.
In his approach to filmmaking, Rio Oshiro dives beneath the surface, allowing his subjects a space to reveal their true selves; photograph by Will Crooks.
Long before Oshiro found his voice as a filmmaker, he learned the language of connection around a dinner table nearly 8,000 miles away. Raised in Guam, he grew up in a culture where food and community were inseparable—where a stranger on the beach could become family over a shared meal. “You could walk up, strike up a conversation, and ten minutes later, aunties are feeding you and sending you off with good food,” he says. “From that moment, you’re family.”
When he thinks of home, he thinks of tinaktak—ground beef simmered with onions, garlic, cherry tomatoes, and string beans in coconut milk, served over hot rice. “Now that I have a family of my own,” he says, “I can pass down those same traditions.” Oshiro came to Upstate South Carolina for college to study business, but filmmaking found him almost by accident via a GoPro camera, a family trip to California, and a desire to preserve a moment.
After college, he and his wife built a wedding photography and videography business grounded in a simple question: How do we honor this story well? That question didn’t stay confined to weddings. It became a throughline for everything that followed—preserving moments, honoring his subjects, and sharpening his craft. When their first daughter was on the way, Oshiro knew that weekend wedding work was no longer sustainable. He wanted to build something with longevity—something that could grow alongside both his family and his craft.
Undercurrent Film Co. was born, and with it, a clearer sense of the stories he felt called to tell. That same instinct shaped Great Wall, Oshiro’s 2024 James Beard Award–winning short documentary about Khailing Neoh, the Chinese American founder of Greenville’s Sum Bar restaurant.
“At its core, I want to keep peeling back the layers. It’s not the top of the wave that gets you—it’s the undercurrent that really brings you into the story.”
Through Oshiro’s eyes, Neoh’s journey from chemical engineer back to her family’s restaurant roots became more than an origin story—it became a meditation on family, identity, and the tension between the life we inherit and the one we’re meant to build.
Still, Oshiro’s latest work may be his most defining yet. Through a mutual friend, he was introduced to Taylor and Fran Montgomery of Montgomery Sky Farm in Western North Carolina just before Hurricane Helene reshaped life across the region. In the storm’s aftermath, the Montgomerys began using what remained of their harvest—and Taylor’s decades in professional kitchens—to prepare meals for displaced families and hard-hit mountain communities.
“Feeding people was our most immediate instinct because food is our most direct language of care,” Fran says. “In moments of crisis, nourishment becomes far greater than sustenance—it becomes reassurance, dignity, and connection.” Oshiro saw something bigger than relief footage. “I can’t write the big checks,” he says. “But I can craft a story.”
Oshiro’s new film The Soil Remembers is a reminder to care for the land and each other, while his award-winning 2024 short film Great Wall chronicles Khailing Neoh’s (bottom left) circuitous journey from engineer to dim sum restaurant owner; photography courtesy of Rio Oshiro.
Though he credits a small team of collaborators, The Soil Remembers became a deeply personal project—one that revealed unexpected parallels between Taylor’s journey and his own. “Taylor used his limited resources to impact his community,” Oshiro says. “This project taught me what can happen when you work with what you have. The Soil Remembers was less about bigger crews and nicer equipment and more about the ability to see and tell a beautiful story.” For Fran Montgomery, that ability was immediately clear. “Rio doesn’t approach a story looking for spectacle or sentimentality,” she says. “He creates space for people to be fully seen.”
The Soil Remembers is a reminder to give back more than we take," Oshiro says. "The land is a living thing that will outlive all of us, and it's our responsibility to steward it well—to leave a legacy for the next generation." For Oshiro, that's beginning to feel less like a film's message—and more like his own.
Because whether he's filming in a kitchen, a field, or across a dinner table, the stories that matter most were never on the surface.
Explore the work of Rio Oshiro and Undercurrent Film Co. at undercurrentfilmco.com.
This story appears in our Summer 2026 issue.
