Remembering Every Night

Tama New Town is a residential area to the west of Tokyo, built in the mid-1960s when housing costs were exploding in Japan’s capital. Multi-storey residential blocks, swathes of green parks and communal public space bear witness to a social vision that has since passed into history. The latest film from Yui Kiyohara follows three women over the course of one day as they move in and around Tama New Town. It is a film built around the quotidian: appointments at the job centre, bus rides, cycling, the pleasure of seeing early summer blooms in the park or glimpsing ever-new perspectives on utilitarian architecture. The three characters occasionally cross paths, such as when the eldest of the trio imitates the younger’s movements as she dances in the park. This is all orchestrated by camerawork and editing that demonstrate a remarkable sense of intimacy and distance and an equally unerring awareness of the optimal moment for an unexpected counter-shot; here and there a synthesiser intrudes into the proceedings, spitting out gurgling, rattling sounds in the gentlest of ways. (Berlinale)