Old images of Sydney Pollack’s last feature-length film, The Interpreter (2005) filmed at the United Nations, come to mind. In an interview he hinted that this type of building reduced camera locations. A progressive shift from ear to eye, forsaken in a gigantic European building in Brussels, translator Carly Wijs allows herself to be captivated by the temperament of Japanese youths. In this normed context, a passing humanity surfaces.

(Source: Gilles Grand, Fid Marseille)

Winter cold blows past the flags of the labyrinthine Berlaymont building—the beating heart of the European quarter and its hurried workers. The empty corridors and committee floor face the night under the hum of a fluorescent light. In the shadows, English-speaking Carly Wijs translates a news bulletin about young Japanese people resisting a grueling work ethic from their bedrooms.In sober tableaux, filmmaker and KASK lecturer An van Dienderen shows Carly’s wonder at what she translates. Soothing, childlike, and letting things take their course. Softly spoken words blossom. Hikikomori. Furita. Their letters dance across Carly’s lips until they transcend their negative connotations. Cherry Blossoms shows, never forcefully and always deeply human, that cinema and language can be cut from the same poetic cloth and that there is a non-Western alternative to the work pressure we all experience: tranquility as a form of resistance. (in: Kortfilm.be by Flo Vanhorebeek)

Watch the film here.