NAOMI KAWASE - TSUIOKU NO DANSU / TARACHIME

Over the years, Naomi Kawase (Japan, 1969) has built up a reputation for making extremely personal diaristic films. Her cinema, a constant interplay between intimacy and distance, the visible and the invisible, articulates the search for an elusive truth that can be only captured through a minute symphony of fleeting moments. Tsuioku No Dansu depicts the final days of Nishii Kazuo, a dying Japanese critic who asked Kawase to film him. The result, an intimate face to face confrontation between life and death, opens up a universal reflection on the way we live and die just as the exchange between the filmmaker and her film ’object’ weaves "a memory of time shared" that continues to live on. In Tarachime, Kawase films her own pregnancy and the birth of her son Mitsuki. The moment that the umbilical cord is cut, Kawase gets hold of her camera and starts filming. What she originally intended as a “docu-diary”, tracing only the period from the day she conceived her child until his birth, becomes per se a meditation on the world around her, her origins and the future. Naomi Kawase was awarded for the second time at Cannes in 2007.

Tsuioku No Dansu (Letter from a Yellow Cherry Blossom)
2002, 65’27”, video, colour, Japanese spoken, French subtitled.
Tarachime (Birth/Mother)
2006, 38’54”, video, colour, Japanese spoken, French subtitled.

In collaboration with ARTE France

The Ecran d’Art series is a monthly screening of artists’ film and/or video jointly organised by argos and Cinema Arenberg, in collaboration with La Cambre Academy.