THE SOWER OF STARS

Director's Statement

Tokyo at night is dazzling, a fantasy of hypnotising lights. Observed with distance and stillness, if you let yourself be carried away by them, you can find a meditative atmosphere there. The first thing I tried to capture was this peaceful feeling, hidden within the vertigo of a megalopolis like Tokyo.

I worked on the image with two plastic references that emerged very quickly: Zen landscape painting, out of which I could underline the idea of emptiness, as well as silence and the cyberpunk aesthetics of films like BLADE RUNNER, to build futuristic neon architectures by superimposing planes.

From this atmosphere I began to think the story. I am always interested in the limbo space between life and death, imaginary and real, where the borders blur to make the spectral and dream-like emerge. I wanted the story to pass through these ideas, giving shape to it from a dialogue of disembodied voices. Voices that cross the city – limbo while being both outside and inside the image, as a kind of depersonalisation.

I constructed the dialogues from a certain poetic crypticism inspired by kōan (mystical teachings of Zen Buddhism). They gradually settled down, from readings, in a script rather by an editor than a writer, like a book of aphorisms that keeps little jewels. Very condensed thoughts related mainly to contemplation, because this was the biggest challenge for me here: to find a balance between narration and contemplation, between text and image, ensuring that they enhance each other, despite each one demands a different attention from us: one more sensitive, the other more rational.