I'm heading to Japan for a month with the family. Tokyo this time, so there's a lot to do and see. I've got a couple of projects I'm working on in and around Tokyo, and I'm going to shoot another installment of "The Souvenir Series," my 12-part short film series about different aspects of memory.
I'll post more details later, but the idea is one I've had since freshman English in college. My teacher at BYU, a woman named Elouise Bell, talked about how the world she knew, knew firsthand, that is, was actually quite a narrow place: Utah, parts of Los Angeles, some small towns in France where she'd lived as a young woman... Ever since that class, I've seen the idea of "my world" as something ressembling a cell phone coverage map, but for a very crappy service provider: thin ribbons of well-traveled routes connecting small-to-largish zones of familiarity, but surrounded by unknown, uncovered territory.
It's like saying you konw New Jersey because you take the Turnpike. Trust me, get about 30 seconds off the Turnpike, and you'll be in a foreign country, my friend.
In the film, I'm going to retrace some of the paths I laid down in rural Japan almost twenty years ago, when I lived there as a bike-riding, 19-year-old Mormon missionary. The core idea is retracing, to document some attempts to retrace the routes I used to take every day, all the time. It may be like riding a bike, or it may not. We'll see.
