Sensitive, fluid, physical, erotic, meditative, melancholic. These are the words critics reach for when describing Yoriko Mizushiri’s films, and none of them quite captures the whole. Born in Aomori, Japan, she creates animations that bring body parts and everyday objects to life with a delicacy that is entirely her own. She deliberately avoids drawing faces and eyes, stripping out emotion to concentrate on pure movement and sensation.
Her films have screened at festivals worldwide, including Berlinale Shorts and Quinzaine des Cinéastes at Cannes. Anxious Body won 15 international awards. She also designed the visual identity for Animafest Zagreb 2020.
At Kinomural she’s showing Ordinary Life. You’ve lived this day before, and you’ll live it again tomorrow: the film is all about the small moments we repeat endlessly, which somehow never come out quite the same. A breath, a movement, a touch, and then something quietly dissolves. While the mind drifts off somewhere else, the body stays right here, tugging us back into the present to actually feel it, and for Mizushiri that might be the whole point of being alive. She works in delicate colours and the tiniest of gestures: a dog, a bag dancing in the wind, a pair of feet walking nowhere in particular, scenes you’ve seen a thousand times that suddenly look brand new, almost sacred. A French-Japanese co-production, it premiered at Berlinale 2025 and walked away with the Silver Bear.
