A beautiful, complex piece of imagery tangled with religion and psychology. The visual weight is heavy, but the message underneath is oddly positive. That contrast has stayed with me.

The reason I picked up a film camera. The way the hands touch, the small details in the performance, it moved me. This is where I realized I’m drawn to images that carry a sense of longing.

Without color, what remains is the light, and the expression on a face.

A film about the boundary between self and other. This is what first got me interested in psychology and how the mind works.

Stillness. Pacing. Silence. My instinct to lean on these as tools of direction comes from Oshii’s work.

Saw this in a hotel room in the US when I was in kindergarten. That night, my brother and I re-enacted bullet-time on the bed. I still remember it. The futuristic color palette and the shadow-heavy imagery stayed with me too.

Finding beauty in a weapon that kills people, and hating it at the same time. Holding both feelings at once, that’s what I find beautiful, and strange, about being human. Eros and Thanatos. This is where my interest in human duality started.

My habit of looking at people and events objectively probably comes from this.

The uncertainty of encounters. Loss. And the way music carries it. This is where I first understood that music can move emotion further than dialogue.