film director / video artist
ARATA MORI
Arata Mori is a Japanese film director and artist, based in Berlin and Tokyo. His creative practice crosses over the fields of documentary & experimental filmmaking, dance-theatre and architecture. He is the graduate of the Fine Art course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.
In 2021, Mori made his first feature-length creative documentary film “A Million”, which depicts an imaginary city on the real urban cities along the new silk road, revived by the Chinese initiative's alternative globalization. The film has had a success to have a world premiere at the documentary film festival, Dok Leipzig.
Since 2019, he co-directs with Andreas Hartmann for the ongoing feature-length documentary film “Johatsu - the Missing”, which deals with the evaporation of people in Japan and so-called “Night Moving Companies”, which help those to disappear. The film is currently shot, in co-production with BR/ ARTE and in participation with SRF and yesDocu.
He has also co-founded another: with Laurian Ghinitoiu, an architecture video project dealing with space, time and art, collaborating with prominent architects and artists including BIG, OMA, SO-IL and Shiota Chiharu.
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.