Dissociative Amnesia

On April 7, 2020, the first state of emergency was declared in Japan. People disappeared from the streets and movie theaters and museums closed their doors. Whatever happens in the world around us, the existence of you and I remain unchanged. As long as we can recognize each other correctly, we should be able to maintain our sanity to some extent. It doesn't matter if someone is still asleep in the hospital, or if the neighbor's cat has gone to heaven. Memories live on vividly in our memories. Sometimes they can evolve into exaggerated images, but what is important to me will continue to evolve inside of me. It's the same even if they don't exist in this world. I think it's almost like a prayer. Surrendering myself to the world of images―what this world needs is imagination! Including all the love we have for our neighbors, strangers, and partners.

The tired man standing on the platform is 27-year-old Ayumu Ueno. Facing an unwelcome trip to his childhood home, he goes to light a cigarette. What he finds in his pocket, however, is a jujuba fruit. The shiny red skin brings back vague memories of his second mother, Rèn Shìróng. Born in the Sichuan province of China, jujuba fruits were her favorite snack. At the time, he didn’t want to call her “Mom,” so at his father’s suggestion, she became “Sis.” As he thinks back on Sis, past and present meet, drawing us into a world neither dream nor reality. –"People can never really understand each other. Thinking back, I feel this way because of my former mother-in-law. That time, when Kansai dialect and Sichuan Chinese flew back and forth around me and I called my mother Sis, is recreated on expired 8 millimeter film. The expiration date of the film used is the same year that she walked out on us."

Oscillation is an experimental short directed by Shun Ikezoe. It is part of FILMS FROM NOWHERE programme which took place in 2020.

We see a woman lying down. She awakens from a dream of a festival she visited in her youth to a scene that feels familiar. Reminiscing on her first love, her marriage, giving birth, and meeting the love of her life, she wanders for a while. Was the place she met him again a dream, or was it Heaven? Was the one she met her first love, or the love of her life? This is a story about love, and about one woman.

Voices from Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who was twice exposed to the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and later became a storyteller, as well as those who continue the storyteller activities with his daughters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and other people who were twice exposed to the atomic bombs. How will a storyteller who was not involved in the story pass on the memories in the future?

An experimental short by Shun Ikezoe.

"I am a cow... this is my naked body... a water buffalo...". A young woman leaves her boyfriend behind with this strange confession. Flower shop owner Yu is faced with a mystery. After the disappearance of his girlfriend, he travels to his old home in the south of the island of Okinawa and visits the family of his brother Akihiro, who works as an entomologist on the coast, in search of answers. During their conversations, Yu learns about a strange sea moth, the "cow moth", into which his girlfriend begins to transform in dreamlike visions.