A film by Hiraki Sawa
With thanks to Rie Nakajima and Elliot Dodd

A boy closes his eyes for 25 minutes and wakes up with the world gone from behind his thoughts. His language slips and shifts, he tastes orange juice without knowing anymore to describe it as sour, he likes numbers but cannot put names to faces. His room is filled with a thousand records and many more. He sees the records, unable to listen. He can't see the floor, has never seen the floor beneath them, wouldn't recognise it if he met it in the street. He meets people in the street and his only option is to trust that they know him when they say they do. His records become opaque, circular slabs of the unknown and the unknowing. A fog of landscapes without contours, without borders, that can only be read by touching. To move forward he must step out, one foot then the other, and believe that he is indeed moving. His mind like an emptied lake, the sky welling upward and outward, unable to contain the depth of it all, the bottomless, fathomless wealth of the things he lost in his sleep.

Text by Dale Berning

Shot on SLR in studio and on location in Mount Toluca, Mexico, Kyoto, Japan and London, UK. Post-production in Adobe After Effects, edited in Apple Final Cut Pro.

I’m displaced.
I lost my memory.
The records function as storage devices.
There is a floor (which talks; it has a cat friend – I don’t like him)
My room is like a protective skin.
My friend is a cigarette.
My shoes are dusty.
It is always the full moon (sometimes it fades)
I need a map (maybe not) for travelling to three places.
I slept for thirty minutes.
Where is my time?
The wall (which I can’t remember) talks to me.
A tree is growing from each of our heads. The trees talk to each other (in front of the wall).

These fragmented ideas are starting points for an exploration of the mind and how it loses things. Initially transcribed as visual sketches, a film will be constructed out of the resulting imagery. Fashioned like a sculptural object, it will deal with ideas of home and memory and the spaces between reality and fiction.

Hiraki Sawa