Water Children

WATER CHILDREN (documentary), 2011A film by Aliona van der HorstNetherlands, 2011, 75 minutes, ColorJapanese/English (English Subtitles)Showtimes: Sat, 9/13 at 7 pm and Sat, 9/20 at 2 pm & 4:30 pm

Tickets here.

CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing) invites you to the NYC premiere of WATER CHILDREN. In this acclaimed, hauntingly beautiful film, director Aliona van der Horst follows the unconventional Japanese-Dutch pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama as she explores the miracle of fertility and the cycle of life—sometimes joyful, sometimes tragic.

Tickets are $10 in advance and $12 at the door.

When Mukaiyama recognized that her childbearing years were ending, she created a multimedia art project on the subject in a village in Japan, constructing what she calls a cathedral, out of 12,000 white silk dresses. While Mukaiyama’s own mesmerizing music provides a haunting backdrop to the film, her installation elicits confessions from its normally reticent Japanese visitors, many of whom have never seen art before—and in moving scenes they open up about previously taboo subjects.

Mukaiyama’s courageous approach to a subject that remains unspoken in many cultures is explored with an elegance and sophistication that deepens our understanding of the relationship between body and mind. We hear from women who talk about their experiences with menstruation, miscarriages, children and the failure to conceive, fertility and sexuality.

The miracle of fertility has always remained a miracle. In Mukaiyama’s unique installation, visitors, as in a ritual, roamed around and fell silent, and sometimes went on to describe intimate details about sexuality and choices made, children who were or were not born.

This led the filmmaker to the ritual of the ‘water children.’ In Japan, premature babies, stillborns, babies that were never born are commemorated in a mythological ritual and known as water children. Because they never had an opportunity to carry out good deeds, they are unable to cross the underworld river and are trapped in stone figurines on a riverbank.

In the film, the sound of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, magically and sensually interpreted by Tomoko Mukaiyama, subtly lifts the individual stories to the universal. The pianist and the filmmaker kept silent for a long time about their own deeper motivations to want to make the film and the artwork. Gradually, while making the artwork and the film, it becomes clear what drives them both, each from her own fate.

Watch the trailer:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpIIXEYEgnw&feature=player_embedded

“As sensuous as Werner Herzog’s early work or Terence Malick, especially ‘Tree of Life'…an extended moment of the sublime.”— Gawie Keyser, De Groene Amsterdammer

“Reserved and breathtakingly intimate… [T]he film penetrates into what is probably still one of the greatest of taboos, menstruation, and, as a consequence, about what femininity and being a woman mean.”— Dana Linssen, NRC Handelsblad

- See more at:

http://www.crsny.org/blog/3022