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CHOREOGRAPHY OF DESIRE 
2025
4K video | 2.39:1 | 60.32 min. | color | sound


Choreography of Desire follows a solitary European man traveling through Japan, whose journey gradually reveals itself as an obsessive pilgrimage devoted to the modernist artist Isamu Noguchi. Charged with longing and quiet fixation, the film unfolds through a series of meticulously composed images in which desire remains unresolved and suspended, inviting the audience into a state of intense emotional identification. The protagonist prepares five replicas of Noguchi’s 1928 Paris Abstraction drawings in an intimate ritual and carries them to five Shinto shrines across the country, offering them as votive gifts. These gestures resemble those of a devoted admirer—or a lover—seeking communion with the spirit of a deceased figure through the animistic cosmology of Shinto. The sites he visits, from remote coastal shrines to forested waterfalls, appear untouched and strangely uninhabited. Japan emerges here not as a lived reality but as a projection: an imagined landscape shaped by Western fantasies, aesthetic reduction, and cinematic desire. Other people are conspicuously absent, producing a dreamlike solitude in which the protagonist seems to wander through a mental image rather than a geographical place. This layered fiction mirrors Noguchi’s own complex positioning between cultures. Born and raised in Japan and the United States, Noguchi cultivated an identity that fulfilled Western desires for an idealized Japan while simultaneously responding to postwar expectations within Japan itself. His work repeatedly staged a mythical version of Japanese culture—a constructed elsewhere that never fully existed. The film situates itself within this lineage, presenting Japan as an assemblage of symbolic locations that function like stage sets, enabling impossible transitions and collapsing spatial logic into cinematic reverie. Here, desire is revealed as a carefully choreographed structure, endlessly circulating between fantasy, projection, longing and loss, across realms and on multiple levels: Choreography of Desire operates as a melancholic manifesto for a lost modernist faith in form, for an imagined Japan, and for queer modes of intimacy that resist social legibility.



Directed / Camera / Edited: Kay Walkowiak
Actor: Andreas Wesle
Composition & Sound Design: Natalia Domínguez Rangel
Sound Design & Mix: Nigel Brown
Color Grading: Andi Winter
Production Assistants: Jacques Carrio, Barbara Walkowiak
Special Thanks: Jacques Carrio
Supported by: Federal State of Austria, Province of Lower Austria, Province of Salzburg, City of Salzburg, City of Vienna





︎ Archive Film