ARATA MORI

 

 

Arata Mori is a Japanese film director and video artist, based in Berlin and Tokyo.

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His creative practice crosses over the fields of filmmaking, dance-theatre, architecture and visual arts. He is the graduate of BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.

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In 2013, Mori made his directorial debut experimental short film “Camino Negro”, which depicts a circulating dream of a nomad who travels in his inner world. This mixture of variable elements of image, poem, philosophy and dance deals with the relation of Body and Image. It was selected for international film festivals including Short Film Corner at Cannes Film festival and Alternative Film and Video Festival Belgrade.

 

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 in Production, and in co-production with BR/ ARTE and in participation with SRF and yesDocu.

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He is also the co-founder and co-director of the architecture video project, another :.


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filmmaker statement

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I have always had disjunctures in my life. They are like a rupture that splits my body into two things, divides it into left and right, west and east, silence and extremity. My soul swings like a pendulum, repeatedly moving back and forth between two opposites. This swinging movement has become the main force to push me forward - to make my film. 

 

Urged by this driving force, I moved to Europe from Japan a decade ago. It was almost an outbreak coming from my constant anxiety - being an outcast in my own country. I was not even a political refugee, but I was exiled from my own body. Of course, after I settled in Europe, I was still “the stranger”, being as an Asian man coming from the far east side. Though time passed, the disjuncture in my body became part of myself, and I became a nomad, who travels on the plain transparent surface of non-land. My own existence fell into the void of the universe of nonsense.

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Now, I see that this globalized world keeps producing new disjunctures within its own systems and territories, while the globalization itself is about to be torn apart and collapse by itself. At this time, a filmmaker is forced to think about a way of new expression that would confront this fragmented world and reach the individuals whose bodies are divided into pieces. The force of disjuncture, the movement of a pendulum, swinging between visible and invisible walls and borders, could overcome our dilemma. We are all ripped animals with disjuncture, and nevertheless, the force makes us desire for the romance of reunion.