Winter cold blows past the flags of the labyrinthine Berlaymont building—the beating heart of the European quarter and its hurried workers. The empty corridors and committee floor face the night under the hum of a fluorescent light. In the shadows, English-speaking Carly Wijs translates a news bulletin about young Japanese people resisting a grueling work ethic from their bedrooms.

In sober tableaux, filmmaker and KASK lecturer An van Dienderen shows Carly’s wonder at what she translates. Soothing, childlike, and letting things take their course. Softly spoken words blossom. Hikikomori. Furita. Their letters dance across Carly’s lips until they transcend their negative connotations. Cherry Blossoms shows, never forcefully and always deeply human, that cinema and language can be cut from the same poetic cloth and that there is a non-Western alternative to the work pressure we all experience: tranquility as a form of resistance. (Flo Vanhorebeek)