This article appeared in the March 28, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

I Like Okinawa Sweet (Chikako Yamashiro, 2004). Courtesy the artist and Yumiko Chiba Associates.

There is something unsettlingly liminal about Chikako Yamashiro’s work. The Okinawan artist’s videos take place, for the most part, on thresholds of one kind or another: graveyards, fences, shores, national borders. The subtext is self-evident. The Okinawa Islands, whose history forms the focus of Yamashiro’s oeuvre, have for decades been an in-between site of ruthlessly competing imperialisms (primarily Japanese and American) thanks to their strategic location in the Pacific Ocean. But the almost eerie slipperiness of Yamashiro’s work goes beyond simple geopolitical metaphor.

In Okinawa Graveyard Club (2004), Yamashiro dances on a grave site in strappy heels and an itty-bitty tennis skirt to a synthy soundtrack; in I Like Okinawa Sweet, made the same year, she leans on the fence surrounding a U.S. base in Okinawa, licking ice-cream cones handed to her one after the other by someone off screen, her face so pornographically ecstatic that it’s painful to watch. In Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat (2009), we see Yamashiro on camera in front of a white background, her face turned slightly to one side, and her eyes red with tears. When she opens her mouth, the sounds we hear are those of an elderly man recounting horrific memories from the Battle of Okinawa.

These films, and three other works by Yamashiro, will screen on Monday, March 31 at the Museum of Modern Art. They are all short—only one exceeds eight minutes—and feature simple, looped conceits, but they both repel and allure with great power: like body horror, or acts of desecration viewed in real time. Legacies of war, occupation, tourism, and sexual violence are all evoked in performances that point to something not just in-between but out of place; something that isn’t where it should be—or is where it shouldn’t be. As far as critiques of colonialism go, what else is there to say?