film director / video artist
ARATA MORI
Arata Mori is a Japanese film director and artist, based in Berlin and Tokyo, the graduate of the Fine Art course at Central Saint Martins in London. His creative practice crosses over the fields of documentary & experimental filmmaking, dance-theatre and architecture.
In 2021, Mori made his creative documentary film “A Million”, a fake travelogue about an imaginary city on the real urban cities along the new silk road, revived by China, which was premiered at the 64th Dok Leipzig.
Since 2019, he co-directs with Andreas Hartmann for the ongoing documentary feature “Johatsu - the Missing”, co-produced by BR/ ARTE, on the so-called “Night Moving Companies” in Japan, which help people to disappear.
He has also co-founded another: with Laurian Ghinitoiu, the project of a series of video, collaborating with leading architects and artists including BIG, OMA, SO-IL and Shiota Chiharu.
Mori is the 2022 grantee of Asian Cultural Council's individual fellowship, established by Rockefeller, and works as as a freelance director for Japanese broadcasts such as NHK and WOWOW.
filmmaker statement
I have always had disjunctures in my life. They are like a rupture that splits my body into two opposites, divides it into left and right, west and east, silence and extremity. My soul swings like a pendulum, repeatedly moving back and forth. This movement has become the main force to push me forward - to make my film.
While dividing my life between Japan and Europe, no matter where I am, I have always been a “stranger”. The disjuncture in my body even became part of myself. I became a nomad, who travels on the plain surface of non-land. My existence has fallen into the void of the universe of nonsense.
Now, I see that this globalized world keeps producing new disjunctures within its own systems and territories, while it is slowly collapsing. Therefore, a filmmaker has to think of a new way of expression that would turn the disjuncture itself into a driving force for creation. The force of disjuncture, the movement of a pendulum, swinging between the visible and invisible, walls and borders, could even give rise to a new construction in destruction. After thousands of wars, we, ripped animals, never cease to desire for the romance of reunion.