japanese
Islands / I Lands
—Cinemas in Exile
  • The Sorceress of Dirah
  • Meta Ekologi
  • Foreign Sky
  • each film . . . an island?
  • Accentuation
  • The Place Where I Live—and touch me
  • Reflection
  • Amami Film: In Memory of Miho-san
  • dolce . . .
  • Puppet Shaman Star
  • Promised Paradise
  • Order
  • Life on Distant Islands
  • The Struggle Against Endemic Diseases
  • At the End of the Arc: Yaeyama Islands
  • Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
  • Maria Rosalie Zerrudo
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    The Place Where I Live—and touch me

    (“Watashi no sonzai shiteiru tokoro—soshite touch me”)
    - JAPAN / 2004 / Japanese / Color / Video / 7 min

    Director, Photography, Editing, Source: Higa Chiaki

    In the interstices between the certainty and uncertainty of the self, this film attempts to visually depict the personal relations, family, and society that surround the self in everyday life. Higa elaborately depicts the weights and chains that burden the self and resistance to this bondage through indispensable linkages with others. A portrait of an artist facing her self with heart and soul, while breathing deeply of the atmosphere of Okinawa.


    [Director’s Statement] I realized that in the time I’ve lived until now, I’ve been changing each day as things move me and resonate within me. Who exactly am I?

    Perhaps I wouldn’t be me if not for the encounters that I’ve had.

    Am I something created? When did I start making choices?

    As I was pondering these things, I had the chance to make a self-portrait, and this work records in film the things I felt.

    My self, at once the most immediate presence and also distant. I am still searching for it.


    - Higa Chiaki

    Born in 1979 in Okinawa. Graduated from the Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts graduate school, where she began presenting video works and two-dimensional art in her solo Chiaki Exhibition (2000), and in the group exhibitions Nest of Bees (2004) and Yuiten (2009). Higa participated in the wanakio 2005 art festival in Okinawa. This film was screened at the Okinawa Motion Picture Festival 2005.