The winter she turned 34, filmmaker Nao Yoshigai lost her mental and physical balance. To remedy this, she begins training at a Zen temple, documenting her days, as structured around a centering routine of meals, housework and prayer. The dancer-turned-filmmaker reexamines a flurry of memories captured over the years – evoked in dizzying photographic collage – as well as the simple acts of eating, sleeping and breathing. She comes to view her body and mind as a “bag of flesh” where bones, organs and the brain float freely, which helps her reclaim her sense of self.

In keeping with the hybrid approach of her ecological Hokkaido-set documentary Shari, Nao Yoshigai returns with the remarkable Masayume – its title translatable as “events in a dream that come true in life”. Masayume collapses the distance between autobiographical filmmaking, photographic collage, observational documentary about Zen Buddhism, animation and interpretive dance, as inspired here by Noguchi Taiso (“Noguchi gymnastics”) – the somatic movement method pioneered by Michizo Noguchi. Yoshigai (along with cinematography by Kaori Oda of Cenote and Underground) offer a remarkably novel documentary style: a bracingly intimate and candid portrait of the mind, the body, perhaps even the soul – of the self within the broader universals of ailing mental health and recovery from loss and grief.