Duration 40min
Production 2025
Production countries, Japan & France
Filmed in Saudi Arabia
Prize & Grant by Allotment Travel Award 2023
– About –
Diary of Eve’s Land draws from a series of video interviews Kyoko Kasuya, Japanese artist, filmmaker conducted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2023. Through social media, she invited women to participate in the project, ultimately bringing together five individuals from diverse backgrounds: a doctor, a psychologist, a medical student, an IT professional, and an immigrant studying at an online university. Against the backdrop of Saudi Arabia’s sweeping societal transformation under the Vision 2030 government initiative, the work captures candid testimonies and everyday footage of women navigating the tensions between societal expectations and their personal aspirations.
**
It was Sally who first told me about the city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. I remember her telling me:
– It comes from جدة, Jaddah, the Arabic word for “grandmother” and also this name would come from the fact that Eve, considered the grandmother of Humanity, would be buried in Jeddah.
I met Sally in the spring of 2022, in Paris. Sally is an industrial designer and works in an office on an equal footing with her male colleagues. Sally then introduced me to her friends and one of her sisters. Zeina, Asmaa, Rouaa were a graphic designer, film-maker, dentist… Their presence and vision of life shifted my preconceived ideas of this country. I also saw similarities with Japan, where I come from. What all these women had in common was that they came from Jeddah.
Sally once told me that her sister didn’t want to return to Saudi Arabia. She had just obtained a PHD in dentistry in the United Kingdom, and had a beautiful career ahead of her back home, but she felt she was too old to have any hope of finding a husband. It was a question I had also asked myself in 2013, the year I graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Montpellier. I replied:
– In Japan it’s the same thing, at 33 you’re an old maid! The best I can hope for over there is an old man or an idiot. And he would have asked me every day why I was still studying!