When Hiroyuki Oki (1964-2025) passed away suddenly late last year, Japan lost one of its most singular and tireless artist-filmmakers. His amorphous work, traversing documentary and fiction, frequently harnessed smaller, more intimate forms of cinema (8mm, 16mm, video, the home movie) for their unique potential. This program brings together four such ‘small’ works—short films in which a direct mode of filmmaking comes to express a sense of erotic desire and longing. In these portrait and landscape works, Oki provocatively explores the camera’s capacity to make contact with bodies and places. Small gestures and snapshot moments come together to produce a larger and denser expression of space and time.

This screening will be preceded by a short presentation by the programme’s curator Keegan O’Connor, and Japanese filmmaker Umi Ishihara.

Programme

Color Wind, 1991, 10 mins
A panorama of melancholic and amorous feelings about the Kochi prefecture come to imbue it anew.

Landscape Catching, 1992, 5 mins
A richly sensuous and erotic engagement with the Kochi landscape.

Color Eyes, 1992, 7 mins
Various bodies move through space in this silent series of intertwined scenes.

Melody for Buddy Matsumae, 1993, 50 mins
An intimate diary film documenting the presence and absence of a lover.