致友人山角洋平：来自故乡的信 Lettres à mon ami Yohei Yamakado depuis son pays natal

Yohei Yamakado has not returned to his native Japan for eight years; his friend Olivier Cheval therefore embarks on an exploration of the land of the Rising Sun, evoking his friend’s memories, almost in a re-enactement of his friend’s life by proxy. Cheval travels, moving from Tokyo to Kyoto, from Kobe to Lake Towada, and in the meantime he juggles, in an equally exploratory way, between childhood and memory, between exile and friendship, making the invisible tangible.

Olivier Cheval’s introspective journey rule out any touristic filter and, on the contrary, from every image and landscape tries to materialize what is not physically there. A sort of sequel to a previous correspondence between the director and Yamakado (Lettres sur la peste, La Découverte/lundi matin, 2022), it is at the same time a whispered reflection on the standardization of urbanism and architecture, which uses that border between estrangement and recognizability to take on the fascinating features of a ghost-movie.