I Remember the Crows

Winner of the Joris Ivens prize at the Cinéma du Réel documentary festival, I Remember the Crows was shot over the course of one sleepless night, capturing Japanese-Brazilian transgender actress and filmmaker Julia Katharine as she muses on insomnia and reflects on her life. Wistful but without bitterness, Katharine describes her “first love”—which wasn’t, but in which she was treated the way she saw herself, as a girl; her relationship with her mother; her trip to Japan, the country of her father’s birth; her enduring love affair with cinema; and her plans for the film she has written, Tea for Two (also included in this program). “Katharine has a dreamy, discrete, but also charismatic presence, as if the actress herself inhabited the fictional world she has invented. In this flirtation with autofiction, she slowly has built a screen persona entirely her own. Her aptitude for staging and performing encounters has a counterpart in her interest in moments of waiting and suspended actions, as if existing in a filmic scene is enough, as long as this scene is filled with tender small gestures and generous feelings” (Natalia Brizuela, Film Quarterly).