Contours of Being: Margaret Tait / Naomi Kawase

Spanning different cultures and eras, Naomi Kawase and Margaret Tait explore aging as from the lens of richly lived, relational experiences distinct from biological fact.

In rural Nara, Japan, Kawase turns her wandering camera toward her elderly surrogate mother, observing an aging body as a quiet archive of memory, tenderness, and impermanence.

Four decades earlier in Orkney, Scotland, Margaret Tait presents a pioneering work of poetic and experimental cinema, finding lyricism and dignity in age, gesture, and stillness.

Together, these works reveal how intimate acts of looking across time, place, and filial bonds can form a shared cinematic language of aging.

Portrait of Ga, 1952 by Margaret Tait

4min | English

Preceding Kawase’s films, Portrait of Ga is a quiet, intimate film made by Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait, a pioneering figure in poetic and experimental cinema.

The film observes Tait’s mother, known as “Ga,” in her everyday surroundings on the Orkney Islands. Through small gestures, glances, and moments of stillness, Tait creates an unsentimental yet deeply affectionate portrait that is often described as one of the earliest personal essay films.

Katatsumori かたつもり, 1994 by Naomi Kawase

39min | Japanese with English subtitles

In the idyllic countryside of Nara, director Naomi Kawase observes her surrogate mother - Granny Uno.

Reminscent of Koreeda’s Still Walking mixed with pangs of Charlotte Well’s Aftersun, the camera traces outlines of a life on the verge of disappearance, where simple everyday gestures become a grainy time capsule of hidden treasures.

Simple yet elegant, Katatsumori – a colloquial term for ‘snail’ in Japanese – is an intimate glance at the proof and patterns of an aging body through the gaze of youth, and what an anatomy love, care, and memory looks like beyond the surfaces of the skin.

Ten, Mitake 天、見たけ (See Heaven), 1995 by Naomi Kawase

10min | Japanese with English subtitles
Naomi Kawase’s more experimental follow‑up to Katatsumori is composed through fragments, sound, and everyday rituals.

Observing her mother within cycles of dusk, burning, and routine labour, the film situates aging within an ecology of light, matter, and time.

Overlaid phone recordings and intimate gestures dissolve boundaries between human and environment, framing the aging body not in isolation but as something sustained by interdependence, seasonal rhythm, and quiet, ongoing transformation.

Chiri 塵 (Trace), 2012 by Naomi Kawase

45min | Japanese with English subtitles

A quiet culmination of Kawase’s early films made around her mother, Chiri turns to photographs, empty spaces, light, and lingering traces as an anatomy of a life that has already moved on.

Meditative yet intimately mesmerising, Chiri recalls the drifting temporality of Apichatpong, with the quiet, restrained gaze of Chantal Akerman’s ethics of looking - one that holds space for loss without a need for explanation or closure.