• KIRISAME •
April 2022 Virtual Program
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Chiyo • Chiemi Shimada
12 min 39 sec • video
Synopsis •
Chiyo is a poetic exploration of the Japanese suburbs through the filmmaker’s reflection on the life of her grandmother. With a series of everyday moments in Yashio, Saitama prefecture from a summer fair to Buddhist rituals, the film meditates on family, intimacy and ageing.
Artist Bio •
Chiemi is an artist-filmmaker based in London. Working with both analogue (8, 16mm film) and digital materials, her films explore themes of intimacy, domesticity, and modernity while utilising documentary, fiction and experimental approaches. Her films have been screened at ICA, LUX, BFI, Nunnery Gallery, Close-up, Wolf Kino, Typography Center for Contemporary Art, Image Forum, among others.
bakufuu, hinoumi: bomb wind, ocean fire • Sancia Miala Shiba Nash
22 min 18 sec • video
Synopsis •
Kohei Shiba, my maternal grandfather, harvests jagaimo in Nakameguro, Tokyō, where his family has lived for five generations. Seventy-six years ago, when Kohei was fifteen years old, this same land was the target of US air raids. Tokyōdaikūshū still haunts the living: the wind evokes the bakufuu, bomb winds, that stole the breath of the land.
bakufuu, hinoumi: bomb wind, ocean fire (2021) is structured around Kohei’s memories of the Tokyo air raids recorded over three years from 2018 to 2020. In the oral histiory interviews he reflects on his early adolescence during wartime Japan: horses running in the blackness of night, filing nuts and bolts for the nation’s war effort, wearing white to deflect the light of the atomic bomb.
This short experimental film comprises recent footage of my family’s home in Nakameguro, archival footage of Hiroshima from the US National Archives and Records Administration, and appropriated footage of Tokyo-3 from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Artist Bio •
Sancia Miala Shiba Nash is a filmmaker from Kīhei, Maui, ka pae ʻāina o Hawaiʻi. Through time-based media, primarily video and sound, she helps to amplify lesser-known transpacific stories of place. Oral history interviews and private/public archives provide the foundations for her collaborative practice. She is currently part of Oʻahu based film collective kekahi wahi and helping to catalog Nā Maka o ka ʻĀina’s video collection.