A young man deliberately chooses to live on the streets. After Kei tried and dropped out of university and military service he finds his happiness in turning his back on his performance-oriented society. He sleeps under bridges, meets new people in the streets and devotes all his time to his passions – classical music and military games. It’s doubtful whether he can keep up this lifestyle, because reality always catches up with him. The film follows this freedom-loving dreamer who is completely carried away by his outsider’s role with an almost meditative calm and breathtaking music.

Kim Busch

A young Japanese woman in Bosnia-Herzegovina. She is both subject and object of a poetic film research in a foreign land. Attempts to inscribe herself into unfamiliar daily routines. Nomadic invididuality on lonely outposts. What could easily have become self-satisfied introspection is shown in “Toward a Common Tenderness” as a deficient state of being that must be cracked open. The camera becomes the filmmaker’s physical and spiritual tool to capture her own story, her current human and geographical environment and a path through life that may or may not result from this.

Kaori Oda’s film has a mysterious beauty, a beauty on uncertain terrain. Perhaps it most resembles the kind described by Robert Bresson in his “Notes on Cinematography”: “The beauty of your film will not be in the images (postcardism) but in the ineffable that they will emit.”

Ralph Eue