Film & Video
O Silêncio é Muito Eloquente
(Silence Is Very Eloquent)
7 min | 2025 | HD video 3:4, color, stereo | Portuguese, Japanese with English subtitles
The film emerges from Thaís' personal archive of counter-narratives within the Okinawan diaspora in Brazil. For about a decade, her anthropological research “O Meu Gene Não é Solúvel” (My Gene Is Not Soluble) has traced the sociopolitical context of Japanese and Okinawan immigration to Latin America in the twentieth century. Over time, this investigation has unfolded across written and audiovisual forms, each medium testing the limits of what can be said.
Working from an anticolonial praxis, Thaís confronts a central methodological problem: how to research stories where silence—rooted in trauma, humiliation, and violence—has become an imposed norm. She examines how spaces of exclusion persist on the periphery of social sciences, which, as Grace Cho observes, tend to produce "ghosts."
The film asks what it means to work with these ghosts rather than against them. If silence is not absence but a language, what does it communicate? And what conditions would allow it to speak?
These questions are not rhetorical. They structure the film's inquiry into whose stories are legible, whose are dismissed, and what remains when the archive fails.
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Written, directed & edited by Thaís Omine
With the participation of Massako Yagi Ticianeli, Elen Yagi Ticianeli and Naomi Asato
Sound design by Jay Jeong & Thaís Omine
Audio excerpt from Tsunehiko Miyagi “Survivor of Mass Suicides and Archivist of Suicide Testimonies” (2010)
Featured exhibitions & performances documentation: “가닥 Gadag: Threads of Memory” (2024, Oyoun Berlin), “In Living Memory” (2022) by Quyên Nguyen-Le, “Post/Origins of a Woman” (2024) by Min Yoon, “ŪTŌTU” (2022, Shimanchu no Moashibi Campo Grande) by Hiromi Toma, “Varais” (2022, Contemporary Art Musem Campo Grande) by Patricia Pontes, “Portunhol Selvagem Feminista” (2022, Contemporary Art Musem Campo Grande) by Mariana Arndt
Public screenings:
(2026) “Caring Histories: Asian Caregivers in Berlin – Migration, Memory, and Social Change (1950–present)” curated by Kathy-Ann Tan, Mental Health Art Space Berlin
(2026) “Lost Tapes” curated by Renan Manhães
(2025) “Visual Anthropology from the Ryukyus” curated by Mateus Bagatini, SawaSawa Tokyo
(2025) “Visual Anthropology from the Ryukyus” curated by Mateus Bagatin & Shannon Welch, Tokyo College
(2025) “6th Symposium on Feminism and Intersectionality in Okinawa” Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology & University of the Ryukyus
(2025) “Stories that We Imagine, Stories that Connect Us” “Geschichten, die wir uns vorstellen, Geschichten, die uns verbinden” group exhibition with Lizza May David, Fumiko Kikuchi, Thaís Omine, Kyong Ju Park. Curated by Kathy-Ann Tan. Kunstverein Langenhagen (Hannover)
Fantasma (Ghost)
Audiovisual installation | chiffon, gauze and silk paper | 300x150cm
A whisper of memory drifts between layers of chiffon and gauze, translucent as forgotten histories. The ghosts are here—not vanished, but suspended in the red threads that stitch together time, trauma, and the weight of silence. Two films breathe through the fabric: one, an experimental murmur (O Silêncio É Muito Eloquente), seeps through delicate gauze like a half-remembered dream. It carries the unspeakable—Okinawan voices scattered across the Brazilian diaspora, their stories dissolved into silence, yet persisting as spectral traces. On the other side, Maré (2022), unfolds across white chiffon, its long tail pooling like an unfinished confession. Between them, the US flag flickers—an archival specter—while a cartoon rat-man creeps through paper, a grotesque echo of 1908 Japanese migration to Brazil, a colonial nightmare stitched into the seams of Western sovereignty. Migration as grotesque, as infestation.
Audiovisual installation as part of "Stories that We Imagine, Stories that Connect Us" "Geschichten, die wir uns vorstellen, Geschichten, die uns verbinden" (2025) group exhibition with Lizza May David, Fumiko Kikuchi, Thaís Omine, Kyong Ju Park. Curated by Kathy-Ann Tan. Kunstverein Langenhagen (Hannover)
Maré (Tide)
39 min | 2022 | HD, Archival | Portuguese with English subtitles
"Maré", tide in Portuguese, is a short documentary about three young Brazilian Uchinaanchu women – Naomi Asato, Lúcia Kakazu and Miwa Higa – daughters of the Okinawan diaspora in São Paulo, Brazil. The film is a result of encounters and conversations shared with them in 2022, in which they talk about their own research and artistic practices acting as "native anthropologists" to take ownership over the colonized histories and narratives about Okinawa and the diaspora. They tell us the herstories of Utiná from the land that we now call Brasil, challenging who tells and how the stories of the diaspora are told. The film is a complement of a wider anthropological research "O Meu Gene Não É Solúvel" about the Okinawan diaspora in contemporary Brazil.
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Written, directed & edited by Thaís Omine
Featuring:
Silvia Naomi Asato
Lucia Kakazu
Laís Miwa Higa
Artistic Direction & Sound Mix
Catita Alves
Mentorship
Lisa Gründ
Solomon Mekonen
Kristian Petersen
Tami Libermann
Special Thanks
Hiromi Toma
Elen Ticianelli
Masako Ticianelli
Nadya Gushiken
Ellen Aiko
Renata Kawano
Patrícia Aguena
Associação Okinawa de Campo Grande
Public screenings:
(2026) “Caring Histories: Asian Caregivers in Berlin – Migration, Memory, and Social Change (1950–present)” curated by Kathy-Ann Tan, Mental Health Art Space Berlin
(2025) “Visual Anthropology from the Ryukyus” curated by Mateus Bagatini, SawaSawa Tokyo
(2025) “Visual Anthropology from the Ryukyus” curated by Mateus Bagatin & Shannon Welch, Tokyo College
(2023) Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften 2023 curated by Ana Correa
(2022) “Visual and Media Anthropology” curated by Kristian Petersen, Kino Moviemento Berlin