The miracle of fertility has always remained a miracle. The filmmaker followed the trail of the unconventional Dutch-Japanese pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama who made a multi-media artwork on this theme. She created a cathedral-like space out of thousands of white dresses in which visitors, as in a ritual, roamed around and fell silent, where people confessed intimate details about children who were or were not born, sexuality and choices made. This led the filmmaker to the ritual of the ‘water children’ for premature babies, stillborns, babies that were never born. In the film, the sound of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, magically and sensually interpreted by Tomoko Mukaiyama, subtly lifts the individual stories to the universal. The pianist and the filmmaker kept silent for a long time about their own deeper motivations to want to make the film and the artwork. Gradually, while making the artwork and the film, it becomes clear what drives them both, each from her own fate.
Credits picture from Tomoko behind the piano Shinji Otani
Photo used for the poster & DVDcover: Carla van de Putterlaar
www.waterchildren.nl
