The body of a man washes up on the beach of Amami-Oshima, a subtropical island between Kyushu and Okinawa. Sixteen-year-old Kaito thinks he recognizes his mother's lover in the dead man. A mother he barely speaks to because he blames her for his father leaving the family. The mother of Kaito's extremely timid schoolmate Kyoko is dying and Kyoko is also struggling to find words for her loss. Death, water, nature, youth, love.
As always, Naomi Kawase, who was born in Nara in 1969, only needs a few essential motifs to tell a story that is delicately rooted in the everyday - and effortlessly reaches over into the fundamental, where there is talk of the possibility of harmonious accord between earthly existence and cosmic forces. Hanns-Georg Rodek says of the filmmaker's works, which repeatedly revolve autobiographically around the theme of family: “For the duration of a Kawase film, one would like to believe that man is a cog in creation and not its ringleader.” A sentence that is wonderfully realized in Still the Water (Futatsume no Mado) (2014), which Kawase first set on the island where her ancestors came from.
