WHILE THE CROW WEEPS

WHILE THE CROW WEEPS is themed around the primary will and instincts of “living” which only animals possess. Their will towards pure living is poignant, inherently lacking language. The relationship between the baby crow and its mother in this short film tells us that the two contradictory concepts of life and death complement each other, and that it is a relationship of the “pr inciple of participation”. Through the depiction of the baby crow surviving by preying on its mother, who sacrifices herself for her offspring, the film effortlessly transcends the taboo of cannibalism, expressing symbolic imagery of a life fusing with another’s.

This is a powerful new work by SUKIKARA Makiko that depicts the grim reality of living in the wild. The brilliant texture and the accuracy of the portrayal is overwhelming, patiently depicting a cloudy sky at dawn, the thickness of a mist, or how crows rise up one-by-one into the air. And there is no anthropomorphic emotional interpretation whatsoever in the countenance of the crows. The uniform inclusion of a sense of strain in this world, and living and dying in it, is a single large idea, and the crows that live based on this are depicted with majesty. We can expect much from artists who create this kind of selfproduced work. (WADA Toshikatsu)