Haiku #1

Owl Gets in Your Eyes

January 1994 •French

Part of Chris Marker’s Three Video Haikus series, Owl Gets in Your Eyes observes owls and their young in quiet close-up, capturing their shifting expressions and watchful gaze.

The Voyage of Bashô

March 2019 •French

A fictionalised documentary about the great Japanese poet Bashô (1644–1694), the spiritual father of haiku poetry. A monk, portraying the poet, journeys through Japan, following Bashô's journal and writing many of his haikus. A ruminant, poetic, Zen Buddhist observation of nature – a return to the lost paradise of unspoilt nature.

Three Haiku Videos

January 1994 •English

A collection of three short “video haikus” by Chris Marker. Yanka / Tchaika observes the Seine beneath a bridge; Owl Gets in Your Eyes features Catherine Belkhodja with an owl superimposed in flight; and Petite Ceinture pays homage to the Lumière brothers by filming empty train tracks along Paris’s disused railway.

Tchaïka

January 1994 •French

Part of Chris Marker’s Three Video Haikus series, Tchaïka is a brief visual meditation showing an overexposed view of a bridge and the river flowing beneath it.

Aeon

November 2004 •English

Dealing heavily with perceptions of time, Aeon documents the urban cityscape as Wellington transforms through a zen-influenced eternal cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth within a 24-hour period.

Llámame Dolores

April 2024 •Spanish

On the threshold of her old age, Dolores faces a wall full of memories.

Petite Ceinture

January 1994 •French

Part of Chris Marker’s Three Video Haikus series, Petite Ceinture is a brief visual meditation on Paris’s abandoned circular railway, filmed as an homage to the Lumière brothers.

My Neighbors the Yamadas

July 1999 •Japanese

The Yamadas are a typical middle class Japanese family in urban Tokyo and this film shows us a variety of episodes of their lives. With tales that range from the humorous to the heartbreaking, we see this family cope with life's little conflicts, problems, and joys in their own way.

Wife! Be Like a Rose!

August 1935 •Japanese

Kimiko, a Tokyo white-collar working girl, lives with her serious, intellectual, haiku-writing mother. Kimiko seeks to marry her boyfriend but needs her absent father to act as the go-between and negotiate the marriage. Kimiko travels and finds her father living with a second family.

Winter Days

November 2003 •Japanese

An animated film based on one of the renku (collaborative linked poems) in the 1684 collection of the same name by the 17th-century Japanese poet Bashō. The creation of the film followed the traditional collaborative nature of the source material – the visuals for each of the 36 stanzas were independently created by 35 different animators. As well as many Japanese animators, Kawamoto assembled leading names in animation from across the world. Each animator was asked to contribute at least 30 seconds to illustrate their stanza, and most of the sequences are under a minute (Yuriy Norshteyn's, though, is nearly two minutes long).

Black Power is Green Power

October 2022 •French

Love Is Five Seven Five

March 2005 •Japanese

A haiku club comprised of five unlikely students aim to win the national high school haiku tournament.

Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop

July 2021 •Japanese

After meeting one day, a shy boy who expresses himself through haiku and a bubbly but self-conscious girl share a brief, magical summer.

FALL

November 2023 •French

Monks

November 2016 •

A haiku film poem. the early morning waiting for the monks. the voices. the fire. the wat drum.

circles

November 2014 •

a haiku films, a poem by Nha Thuyen

Four Haikus

March 2024 •Spanish

Twelve shots, four sequences. Each of them will try to evoke a feeling, a sensation, an idea, a landscape… just like the iconic and transcendental Japanese poems known as “Haiku”.

Eternal Return

November 2022 •English

A poet and a spirit have an ongoing deal: Haiku for life.

I Imagine a Text that Changes

July 2020 •Spanish

A haiku about a window and a woman.

El que no ve

February 2024 •Spanish

A short documentary film that starts from the story of Montxo Rejano and approaches people excluded from society who live like shadows, in a kind of limbo, in a kind of eternal night and condemned to perpetual waiting and to subsist in a world without light. They once had lives like everyone else, but in the cold and the dark it's very easy to forget that.