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TOKYO EYE 
2025
4K video | 2.39:1 | 9.44 min. | color | sound


Tokyo Eye follows an elderly man through his nocturnal labor in the dynamic metropolis of Tokyo. Impeccably dressed in workwear, he stands motionless at various locations, carefully holding a sign in his hands. The stylized eye depicted on it—reduced to geometric essentials and marked by a red or blue iris—references the Bauhaus aesthetic, a symbol of modernity and functionalist design. The clash between the Bauhaus ideology transmitted through the sign and the lived reality of contemporary urban life produces ruptures that open onto broader socio-political questions. These tensions are embodied in the figure of the man himself, whose role remains unresolved: Is he a quiet witness, an idiosyncratic prophet, or an elderly, impoverished individual who has fallen out of the social system? “Form follows function”—a central principle of Bauhaus theory—assumes an unsettling dimension in Tokyo Eye. The man with the sign points to the widespread phenomenon of human advertising carriers in Tokyo, the so-called human sandwich boards. Older individuals in particular take on this work not only out of economic necessity, but also from a desire to assert a sense of functional existence within society. Paradoxically, their purpose consists in becoming pure form—an object within a system that elevates efficiency and consumption to its highest values. Tokyo Eye thus exposes the radical separation between those who consume and those subjects expelled from the market. This tension becomes especially palpable in the contrast between stasis and movement: while the elderly man remains fixed in place with his sign, passersby stream past him—barely acknowledging his presence. The city’s pulsating fields of light, flickering screens, and advertising displays intensify this experience of alienation. He becomes an immobile void within a restless urban choreography. The less the man is perceived, the more disturbing the symbol of the seeing eye becomes. It appears anachronistic, yet precisely for this reason also indicting— as if holding up a mirror to a society that no longer truly sees, but only looks in order to consume.



Directed / Camera / Edited: Kay Walkowiak
Actor: Jacques Carrio
Composition & Sound Design: Natalia Domínguez Rangel
Color Grading: Andi Winter
Sound Editing: Nigel Brown
Production Assistant: Andreas Wesle



︎ Archive Film