Between Oceans | 2021-2023

Between Oceans explores the body’s physical absorption of time, memories, water, and connections to land and ancestry. The film features myself and my mother, code-switching between Japanese and English, sharing stories and memories of times with my father, commenting on intimacy and familial love.

During the years of developing this work, my father continued to be based in Japan, and we were unable to see each other, other than through a digital means. This separation continued from the beginning of 2020 until late 2022, during the pandemic’s most intense period. In the introduction to the film, my father can be seen approaching the water at Enoshima Beach, in Japan. This footage, I added to the film after shooting most of the movement shots on Awabakal land / Newcastle. Here he creates calligraphic gestures in the sand, writing characters within my own namesake as well as the character for ‘human being’ in Japanese; and gazes out to the water as if waiting for what is on the other side.  

The text is an homage to the experiences shared by me and my family, including recollections of trips to local pools, bodies of water and an earthquake that took place while our family was in Tokyo. The recording ends with a segment of a song about the idea of ‘home’ and longing for homeland. Through ritualistic gestures, repetitive movement and cinematic imagery, and time-based media, I use an auto-ethnographic approach to represent familial storytelling, both real and false memories. Through collaborations with my family, oranges and oceans become metaphors for diasporic existences, transience, and gaps between spaces – or 間 [ma] in Japanese.