Logline
Brazil and Okinawa. Past and present. Oba’s agonizing memory of war lives on, passed down to her granddaughter, Bianca, as she navigates the world. Their worlds sway, blur, and melt together in a poetic journey of surviving trauma and rebuilding life.
Synopsis
Obaa’s Hands is rooted in real lives and real history. At its core are two women — a grandmother who survived the Battle of Saipan, emigrated from Okinawa to Brazil, and built a life from nothing — and her granddaughter Bianca. Scenes from the grandmother’s life are reimagined and embodied by Bianca, blurring the line between document and fiction.
Bianca Hikari Kinjo has always lived between worlds. In Brazil, she was “japa.” In Japan, she had become Brazilian. At nineteen, she traveled to Okinawa on a university exchange. She arrived without expecting to belong — and found, for the first time, something that felt like recognition. People called her Uchinanchu because the story of her grandmother still lived in the community’s memory.
Her grandmother, Shigeko Kinjo, lives in São Paulo. She is in her nineties. At nine years old, on the island of Saipan, she survived one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific War. She lost fingers to a bullet. She laid her younger sister to rest beneath a tree. She walked, searching for a place to die. She did not find one. They came to Brazil by boat and train, built a house with their own hands, and began again. Years later, it was Bianca’s father who persuaded his mother to write it down.
Now, Bianca sits beside her grandmother in her final years, reading the diary aloud to her. The film does not move in a straight line. Documentary and fiction, the living and the dead dissolve into each other. Londrina, São Paulo, and Okinawa blur and overlap without warning.
In Londrina, Bianca moves between worlds without thinking — eating onigiri at a Brazilian barbecue, speaking Portuguese and Japanese in the same breath. Before every drive, her father sprinkles salt so the family will return safely. In Okinawa, Bianca chants her family’s house name — iikōjama — searching for traces of people she never met. She stands before a place her family can no longer reach — land now behind military fences. She is Brazilian, Okinawan, and Japanese.
The film ends in a kitchen in Londrina. Bianca and her mother are cooking together. Something quiet and ordinary is happening. Life continues. In those daily gestures, in hands that keep moving, the grandmother’s survived life quietly breathes on.
Minami Iizuka Antropóloga Filmmaker 