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