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 is based on a series of video interviews conducted by Japanese artist and filmmaker Kyoko Kasuya in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2023. Through social media, she invited women to participate in the project, eventually bringing together five participants with diverse backgrounds: a doctor, a psychologist, a medical training student, an IT professional, and an immigrant pursuing her studies at an online university.

Set against the backdrop of Saudi Arabia’s radical social transformation under the government’s Vision 2030 initiative, the film presents candid testimonies and scenes from the everyday lives of women navigating between social expectations and personal aspirations. At the same time, Kasuya’s perspective—as a Japanese woman shaped by her own experiences within society—follows the silhouettes of Saudi women, creating a documentary built on an exchange of gazes and perspectives.

**

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!

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