Still the Water

synopsis

The shores of a picturesque Japanese island are bathed by powerful waves that one night wash up the naked body of a dead man. It is discovered in the morning by a boy whose life is more connected to the corpse than it first appears. This gruesome discovery prompts the teenage protagonists – the boy and his girlfriend – to search for the meaning of the cycle of life and death. They visit the girl's dying mother, who wields magic and can speak to the gods, to learn more about human mortality. In this poetic, contemplative film, the still sea and mysterious water serve as motifs linking human woes to eternity and the afterlife.

“To become one with that wave because it’s the last moment, it has an incredibly powerful energy. Then when you receive that force with your entire body, for a moment it turns into nothingness. Nothingness, or stillness.”

biography

Naomi Kawase (1969) is one of Japan's most acclaimed directors. She hails from the rural Nara Prefecture in the Kansai region, which greatly influenced her early autobiographical shorts. She originally studied television production at Osaka University, where she subsequently lectured for four years. Kawase became the youngest winner of the Caméra d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for her 35mm film Moe no Suzaku. She adapted this and her later film Hotaru (Firefly, 2000) into fiction. In 2007, she won the main prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Mogari no mori (The Mourning Forest), a film dealing with themes of death and grief. She often works with non-actors and explores the boundaries between fiction and reality and the world of documentary and feature film.

more about film

director:	Naomi Kawase
producer:	Takehiko Aoki, Masa Sawada, Naomi Kawase