Lisa Spilliaert is a filmmaker whose work moves across video, photography, and performance to explore autobiography, family histories, and the continuities between memory and fiction. Having grown up between Japan and Belgium, Spilliaert approaches identity as continually negotiated through geography, kinship, and inheritance.

The Best Things in Life centres on three generations of women living together in Tokyo. It follows Mayuka, the artist’s cousin, who, nineteen years after first becoming a mother, has now had her third child. Having chosen to raise her child independently again, Mayuka begins a new chapter in her life alongside her adolescent daughters, Hina and Ciela, who are themselves navigating formative transitional moments. Ciela is beginning her final year of school and facing the uncertainties of first love; Hina, a nightclub hostess, is preparing to leave home. Observing without intervention, Spilliaert’s camera follows the textures of their daily lives.

Drawing on the language of the family portrait, The Best Things in Life is attentive to how even the most intimate forms of becoming are always quietly shared.