Planetary Yui @ Savvy Contemporary 07 & 08 August 2026
Film Program: ECHOES OF THE DIASPORA

The Okinawan diaspora in Brazil is not a single story but a field of tensions—between silence and speech, memory and erasure, assimilation and refusal. The works gathered here approach this terrain from different angles, yet each circles the same difficult question: what does it mean to inherit a history that was never fully told?

André Okuma’s “Moti” anchors itself in the intimate space of a family home on election day. An 84-year-old woman, Nami, begins to speak. As she recounts childhood traumas from 1940s Brazil, her grandson Jun is pulled toward a different kind of conflict, one shaped by the political polarizations of the present. The film holds these temporalities together without resolution, suggesting that the past does not pass but persists, often in forms we fail to recognize. The moti, a traditional Japanese sweet, becomes a quiet metaphor for how sweetness and bitterness coexist within a single inherited form.

“HIA SÁ SÁ HAI YAH!” by legendary director Olga Futemma takes a more confrontational approach. Made in 1985, it examines the images the West has projected onto Okinawan subjects—submissive, hardworking, diligent, but also authoritarian, violent, arrogant—and contrasts them with a suppressed interiority: the territory of conflict and poetry that official narratives cannot contain. The film refuses the comfort of a unified identity, insisting instead on the fractures that define diasporic experience.

Thaís Omine’s “O Silêncio É Muito Eloquente” approaches this history from the perspective of method. Drawing from nearly a decade of anthropological research, the film interrogates how social sciences have historically produced “ghosts”—subjects rendered invisible by the very frameworks meant to study them. If silence is not an absence but a language, the film asks, how do we mourn what we cannot remember? The work does not pretend to answer, but instead dwells in the difficulty of the question.

Taken together, these films form a conversation across time and medium. They resist the impulse to narrativize diaspora as a clean arc of migration, adaptation, and integration. Instead, they point to the unresolved, the unsaid, and the ongoing—echoes that confront oblivion and demand resistance.

Moti
2025｜Short｜Brazil｜18 mins｜Director: Andre Okuma | Portuguese with English subtitles

After an unexpected visit, 84-year-old Nami opens up to her granddaughter Midori, revealing long-buried family secrets and childhood traumas from 1940s Brazil. At the same time, she watches her other grandson, Jun, become consumed by the hatred of political polarization. It’s election day. Past and present, life and death, East and West, left and right all merge within this family, much like a moti, a traditional Japanese sweet.

HIA SÁ SÁ HAI YAH!

1985｜Short｜Brazil｜27 mins｜Director: Olga Futemma | Portuguese with English subtitles

The images the West has of the Okinawan (submissive, hardworking, diligent, authoritarian, violent, arrogant) and the unknown, suffocated face: the territory of conflict and poetry.

O Silêncio é Muito Eloquente (Silence Is Very Eloquent) 

2025｜Short｜Brazil, Germany｜7 mins｜Director: Thaís Omine | 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.