Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth

Kya ka ra ba a

Japan

2001

50 Min

Color

Japanese

Currently 3.9/5 Stars.
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DP Masami Inomoto, Naomi Kawase

SOUND Nobuyuki Kikuchi

Synopsis

“Your father passed away. Give us a call immediately.” The message in Kawase’s cell phone informs her of her father’s death.

More than a year has passed since his death. Also 8 years since Embracing in which Kawase took a camera to film her journey to find her father. She watches embracing with her friends as if she mourns her father’s death, departure from her father. Watching, throughout the film, the repetitive, momentary interviews of people who were involved with him before his death as well as her real mother and her grandmother, Kawase bears unfocused and disconsolate feelings.

All of a sudden, she gets an idea of having a tattoo, the same tattoo her father had through his life, so as to, she thinks, discover the family bond, and then she visits a tattoo artist. The story accelerates from here, and brings the audience to the climax. Is this really a documentary or fiction? Despite this confusion, the film goes on and asks us, “What is love for you?”

At the Locarno International Film Festival in 2001, the film was highly praised for her original film style, the mixed form of documentary and fiction, in which her deep loneliness is realistically presented. The film has been shown more than 30 countries, and now its distribution right, after being produced and screened by ARTE France along with some other films by, for example, Sokurov, has been terminated, and the film will be screened in Japan.

This is a must-see, as of today, Kawase’s culmination as an auteur. The title Kya Ka Ra Ba A is a Buddhist term, kya – the sky, ka – wind, ra – fire, ba – water, and a – earth, all of which, altogether, means the world composed of those elements.

(http://www.kawasenaomi.com/en/works/documentary_film/kya_ka_ra_ba_a/)

Director

Naomi Kawase

Naomi Kawase was born in 1969, at a time when Japanese cinema was thriving with vigorous underground filmmaking, the initial streak in Kawase’s own young career. While studying photography at the Osaka School of Visual Arts, she started to make films as part of a workshop: “I focus on that which interests me” (1988), a personal symphony of the city, “The concretization of these things flying around me” (1989), a silent study of the homeless, "Presently (1989), a poetic piece visualising the 4 elements (water, air, fire and earth). After graduating in 1989, she taught for 4 years.

In 1992, she made Embracing, a medium length 16mm feature in which she sets up to find her biological father (Naomi was brought up by her grandparents after her parents’ marriage broke up). In 1993, she cast her documentary eye on a striking boy-meets-girl fiction in White Moon. She dedicated her following film Katatsumori (94) to her grandmother. This film and the next one… read more