a tiny place that is hard to touch
触れがたき小さな場所
2019, 38:52 min
Texts | Images | Video
In a faceless apartment in Tatekawa, Tokyo, an American woman hires a Japanese woman to translate interviews about Japan’s declining birthrate. The American woman is presumptuous in her knowledge of Japan; the Japanese woman suffers from a self-professed excess of critical distance. They grate, fight, and crash together in love or lust, at which point their story gets hijacked into science fiction territory, as the translator interrupts their work sessions with stories from a world infected with the knowledge of its own demise. This neighborhood has already known devastation, having been wiped out the night of March 9th, 1945, by American bombs.
The third protagonist is the Tatekawa itself, the canal covered by an elevated highway that runs past the translator’s apartment, which gives the neighborhood its name. Reflecting back the concrete world in distorted patterns of blue, green or glittering black, the Tatekawa transports a shifting procession of birds, shoes, condoms, crabs, plastic bags, flowers, big fish, little fish, death, life.
Credits
a film by Shelly Silver
Voice: Saori Tsukada
Translation: Riyo Niimoto
Sound Mix: Mike Degen, Stimulant Sound
Editing Consultant: Mary Patierno
Story Consultants: Frances Richard, Akiko Kikuchi
Post Production Coordinator: Riaki Enyama
Selected Screenings
Berlinale/Forum Expanded, Germany (World Premiere)
Sheffield Doc, UK Premiere
FIDBA/Buenos Aires International Documentary Festival
-Mention-Genres & Generations/Género Y Generaciones
Festival dei Popoli, Florence, Italian Premiere
Kassel Dokfest, Germany
Rencontres Paris Berlin, Louvre, Paris, France
Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan
Videoformes, Clermont Ferrand, France
Fotograf Festival, Prague, Czech Republic
CUFF/Chicago Underground Film Festival
100 Ways to Live a Minute, Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia
Common Places of Suspension, Arkipel, Jakarta, Indonesia