Toward a Common Tenderness

In between Japan and Bosnia Herzegovina, a filmmaker embarks on a physical and spiritual journey to understand the daily life in a foreign land and how it affected their thoughts on filmmaking. Weaving their unused personal footages shot between 2013 and 2016, this film seeks for a possible connection between their current life of filmmaking in Bosnia and their past experience through filmmaking towards their family in Japan. Toward A Common Tenderness presents the filmmaker’s search and struggles to find humanity in filmmaking.

"A young Japanese woman in Bosnia-Herzegovina. She is both subject and object of a poetic film research in a foreign land. Attempts to inscribe herself into unfamiliar daily routines. Nomadic invididuality on lonely outposts. What could easily have become self-satisfied introspection is shown in Toward a Common Tenderness as a deficient state of being that must be cracked open. The camera becomes the filmmaker’s physical and spiritual tool to capture her own story, her current human and geographical environment and a path through life that may or may not result from this.
Kaori Oda’s film has a mysterious beauty, a beauty on uncertain terrain. Perhaps it most resembles the kind described by Robert Bresson in his Notes on Cinematography: "The beauty of your film will not be in the images (postcardism) but in the ineffable that they will emit.""
( Ralph Eue - DOK Leipzig)