Mika Ogai

An off-hand confession about ‘helping a fox’ turns a tipsy date night into a claustrophobic reckoning of mercy, reason, and the terrifying impossibility of knowing another person.

The boundaries between reality, memories and dreams are temporarily dissolved in order to parallel the film-maker’s internal sense of liminality as a ‘hāfu’ (half-Japanese, half-Australian). Drawing on Japanese folklore, memories of the past, and contemporary anxieties, the narrator journeys across her father’s hometown of Sōma, Fukushima, in search of a language that can temporarily capture such liminal entities, including herself.

An off-hand confession about ‘helping a fox’ turns a tipsy date night into a claustrophobic reckoning of mercy, reason, and the terrifying impossibility of knowing another person.

The boundaries between reality, memories and dreams are temporarily dissolved in order to parallel the film-maker’s internal sense of liminality as a ‘hāfu’ (half-Japanese, half-Australian). Drawing on Japanese folklore, memories of the past, and contemporary anxieties, the narrator journeys across her father’s hometown of Sōma, Fukushima, in search of a language that can temporarily capture such liminal entities, including herself.