When the documentary filmmaker Inara Chayamiti migrates from Brazil to the Netherlands, she finds herself a foreigner in her own homeland. She, who considered herself a typical Brazilian in the country’s melting pot, now realizes her non-place: seen as too Japanese in Brazil and not Japanese at all in Japan. So she begins to search for her fragmented identity while investigating her family story.

As in the Japanese art of repairing ceramics with gold, she glues together pieces of this story marked by two diasporas between opposite sides of the world: Brazil and Japan. By using gold in its glue, kintsugi values imperfection and the history of each piece.

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Considering himself Brazilian, Inara’s father broke with Japanese traditions and even married her Brazilian mother, a “gaijin” (“foreigner”), to his family’s disappointment. Her batian (grandmother), born in Brazil, defines herself as Japanese without hesitation. Her uncles have been living in Japan for 30 years as Brazilians. And although her cousins were born there, they are Brazilians who only know Japan.

After all, what makes a person Brazilian, Japanese or from any place? To be born there? To be raised there? To understand it? To love it? And what does it mean to be seen as yellow? What was it like for her grandparents and great-grandparents? 

On her journey for answers, she realizes how much she does not know of her family memories and the collective history. She learns that her batian, at the age of six, was among thousands of Japanese and descendants who lost everything because they were seen as enemies in Brazil during World War II. However, she discovers that this hostility, in the form of racism and xenophobia, had been happening long before the war.

How can we understand these invisibilized stories from a contemporary perspective and bring more pieces for the Brazilianness’ kintsugi itself?