Yoshigai Nao

YOSHIGAI Nao (1987, Japan) is a filmmaker, dancer and choreographer. She studied dance at Japan Women’s College of Physical Education, and continued her studies at the Graduate School of Film and New Media at Tokyo University of the Arts. Referring to her films as “tactile films”, feeling as if one can almost touch the images and the music in them, she makes her films with the concept of dancing in mind. She submitted her first short film Mizukuroi/Grooming (2013) to the contest held by the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), where it won an Excellence Prize. Her film Grand Bouquet (2019), depicting a young woman’s confrontation with society, was selected for the Director’s Fortnight Short Films category of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival. Photographer Ishikawa Naoki, who started the ‘Photography Ground Zero Shiretoko’ movement, invited Yoshigai to make a film about the town of Sharicho on the Shiretoko Peninsula in Hokkaido. She began research in 2019 on the natural environment, life in Shari and the people who live there, resulting in her short film Shari (2021).