Birth/Mother

Naomi Kawase raises her voice in anger, blaming her foster mother for threatening to abandon her as a young girl. The camera reveals Kawase’s impatience when coming to terms with her foster mother’s senility, and at the same time dwells on her aging naked body with a subtle sense of affection. Twelve years after shooting ‘Katatsumori (1994)’, her first film about the foster mother, Kawase made ‘Tarachime’ to document the decline of one life at the beginning of another – during the making of the film, Kawase’s son was born.