There Is a Stone

As elegant and deceptively simple as its title, Tatsunari Ota’s Ishi ga aru, reduces narrative and plot to questions of time, movement, and encounter. The film opens with a nameless woman arriving in a small town, out of seeming nowhere. “Is there anything nice around here?” she asks a local, “Something fascinating?” Her inquiry met with a near-blank stare, she thus drifts, eventually encountering a man skipping stones by the river. Together they pass the afternoon engaged in playful outdoor activities like balancing sticks, stacking stones and more. Finally, they part – their time together curtailed by the inevitable waning daylight – with the unexpected emotional import of their time together left rippling like the water over one of their submerged pebbles.
(Synopsis from Berlin International Film Festival)

『石がある』