When Hiroyuki Oki (1964-2025) passed away suddenly late last year, Japan lost one of its most singular and tireless artist-filmmakers. His amorphous work, traversing documentary and fiction, frequently harnessed smaller, more intimate forms of cinema (8mm, 16mm, video, the home movie) for their unique potential. This program brings together four such ‘small’ works—short films in which a direct mode of filmmaking comes to express a sense of erotic desire and longing. In these portrait and landscape works, Oki provocatively explores the camera’s capacity to make contact with bodies and places. Small gestures and snapshot moments come together to produce a larger and denser expression of space and time.
The screening will take place as part of Queer East festival 2026 on Sunday 3 May 18:00 at ICA London with a short presentation by curator Keegan O’Connor and Japanese filmmaker Umi Ishihara.
Film line-up:
- Color Wind | 1991 | 10min
- Landscape Catching | 1992 | 5min
- Color Eyes | 1992 | 7min
- Melody for Buddy Matsumae | 1993 | 50min