Pareidolia

A short film based on the events surrounding the creation of Eugen Herrigel's book . This popular German book set in Japan in the 1930s gained a cult following in Europe during the post-war years. The author's interpretation of Zen archery pivots on an incident he observed while living in Japan. When his eccentric archery master Awa Kenzo shot two arrows in a darkened hall and one bisected the other, he allegedly exclaimed, "It, the Divine, has shot!" Yet the presence of a translator has since been disputed, raising questions of subjectivity, interpretation and belief. is told from the point of view of a fictional translator between the master and his German apprentice, and the translator's alter ego, a bird. The title points to the need for caution in storytelling, referring to the tendency of human perception to discover meaning in random structures.