Japan, 2019, 32’
In Japanese with Portuguese subtitles

The story centres around two families in Henoko, Nago city in Okinawa, Japan, where plans for construction of a new US military base are ongoing, yet unsettled and in an unstable stage. The complicated feelings of two families in the area are depicted.

The story goes around two families living in Buma, a small village in Okinawa, remained on the bottom of a desertifying crushed stone mountain.

One family of young couple is working on mining of earth and sand. They know that the job chosen for their livings is “digging” their beloved home and the earth and sand are used to reclaim land in the sea for construction of a new US military base, pushed by the strong policy by the Japanese government. Yet, they are looking away from the reality, keeping their immediate happiness with two children; the husband sings opera and the wife sings Ryuka (traditional Okinawan song).

While, another narrative of the other family, a grandfather and his granddaughter goes on. There is a rocky utaki (sanctuary) called tenbune (heaven's boat) halfway up the mountain crushed by the mining, which is shaped like a ship believed to have saved the ancestors of those families from sea distress in the ancient times. The girl notices that signs of "lost" approaching the village as the important incense burner (worshiping God and ancestral spirit) has been lost from the utaki. The girl tells the young wife in the other family that the ancestor’s voice is saying, “The sea has protected us for hundreds of years”, and the wife gradually breaks her mental balance.

The village Buma does not fit for agriculture because of their harsh soil with hard limestone. So most of the people left there with the modernization, selling their barren lands to a mining company. Other people who keep living in the village, not selling their lands, have no choice but to do mining-related work. They stay there, involved in the loss of the village, and only stare at the disappearing home.

Japan, 2002, 8’30’’
Film without dialogues

Blue skies, azure seas: a typical Okinawan landscape. A woman in black (Yamashiro) dances with single-minded intensity before a grave. Eventually her steps lead her away from the grave and along the US military base fence strung across the island. Having learned of the unhealed wounds affecting the island of her birth, and the people who live there, everyday landscapes now take on a different meaning. Beyond the end of the fence she follows as if tracing a scar with her finger, lay a vast expanse of wild, sparkling sea... A video shot almost by feel, as Yamashiro attempts to pin down the true nature of the doubt and disease she harbours in everyday life, Border ends on the beach at Henoko in Nago, a location rocked by controversy over construction of a new American base.

Credits

Director and Cast

Chikako Yamashiro

Photography

Atsushi Hoshino

Editing

Chikako Yamashiro
Atsushi Hoshino

Spain, Japan, Netherlands, 2018, 21’
Documentary
In Japanese with Portuguese subtitles

‘Mountain Plain Mountain’ was shot in Obihiro (Japan), at the last standing venue to host a rare kind of draft horse races known as Ban'ei. Putting together a mix of motionless, contemplative shots and hard-edge, rhythmical, gibberish-rich montages, the slowness of these bizarre races is turned inside out. The track's topography, poetically described by a veteran trainer as "a small mountain, a plain, and a big mountain" is what informs the overall timeline of the film.

Credits

Directors

Daniel Jacoby
Yu Araki

With

Yoshiyuki Hattori
Kurando Funayama
Tetsuya Sato

Music

Liisa Hirsch

Vocals

Matsuritaro

Color grade

Ludovic Roussaux at Okay Studio

Audio mix

Takashi Kataoka

Camera, sound and editing

Yu Araki and Daniel Jacoby

Commissioned by

Fundació Joan Miró

Support

Arts Council Tokyo
Mondriaan Fund

Additional support

Jan van Eyck Academie