Radiance | それはとにかくまぶしい

Radiance
JAPAN | 2023 | Japanese | Color, B&W | Digital File | 18min
Director, Photography, Editing: Shuhei Hatano

Notes
April 2020. In a world where meeting friends was forbidden for an extended period of time, the director decided to shoot each day with no particular purpose in mind: the modest sparkle of the day to day with daughter and wife, fragments pieced together to form a letter to dear friends. Family daily life is reconstructed with a remarkable intuition, gradually creating a magical landscape that can be found nowhere else, leading us to a sense of life and death, and of a love of life which will be passed on, and on. An avant-garde home movie of forgetting and discovering. 

Director’s Statement
No one told me to, but I simply decided to spend a year shooting everyday. Looking back on the period, because I had to capture something with my camera everyday, I had something focus on; and because I kept shooting I also had something to think about. It wasn't because there was anything specific I wanted to capture or record that I tuned the camera on. Rather, first and foremost was the camera, so I performed the act of watching attentively for a year if I was being forced by camera to do so. The camera had become my new eyes. I also had a young child by my side, and her eyes were always wide open to the unknown, which gave me the eyes that I had forgotten. It made me decide to follow her lead and play around in the same way. First, I spent this out-of-the-ordinaly year thinking about this machine called the camera, using it to play around with this world, with my daughter, with the season, with light - and the cinema.

Selection
Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2023 (Japan) - Asian Competition
PUNTO DE VISTA International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra 2024 (Spain) - International Competition
70th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (German) - International Competition
60th Pesaro Film Festival (Italy)- International Competition
Leiden International Short Film Festival 2024 (Netherlands) - International Competition