COSMIC LAND, COSMIC HOME
A film by AMO (Aki Namba, Mary Maggic, Oi Pui Hoang)
Set between an aging house in the Okayama countryside and the immersive landscapes of forests, mountains, rivers, and the ocean, this two-channel film explores the porous boundaries between spirit, land, body, and home. It narrates the interconnection between earth's rhythms and daily life, revealing the threshold between the seen and the unseen. How do we feel, listen, remember, and relate to land, to each other, to unseen energies? The work draws inspiration from spiritual practices where women and gender-diverse people have historically been erased, such as kagura , sacred dances for cosmic balance, and shugendo , mountain pilgrimages rooted in nature worship. It questions how access to sacred space and the natural world has long been restricted, and how reclaiming this space may also be an act of spiritual return.
Here, the rhythms of breathing mountains, traveling rivers, and dancing forests are intertwined with the human body. Landscape and body are not metaphorically linked but experienced as one. In one chapter, a noren (traditional fabric divider) drifts through nature, becoming a spiritual threshold and collector of ancestral memory. In another, a house breathes and listens, its wooden structure stretching across time. Forgotten objects called tsukumogami acquire a spirit after a hundred years and become vessels of the land's stories. These quiet presences suggest that even the inanimate holds memory and life. The house becomes an intermediate site of gathering, where spirits, family members, and lands come together in layered time. As sacred and everyday life merge, Cosmic Land, Cosmic Home leads us into an animistic world where all beings are interconnected and cyclical. Structured in four looping chapters, the film takes the shape of an Ouroboros, with its ending flowing seamlessly into its beginning. Time unfolds cyclically rather than linearly, where boundaries between past, present, and future blur, conveying that each lived cycle offers a deepening of spiritual consciousness.
Music by Aras Levni Seyhan and Oi Pui Hoang
With production support from C4 Projects, Copenhagen
