Still the Water

Still the Water is a drama set on the Japanese island of Amami, where residents see a deity in every tree, stone and plant. One summer evening, sixteen-year-old Kaito finds a man's body floating in the sea. He turns to his girlfriend Kyoko for help in understanding the death, and together the two teenagers confront questions of life, love and mortality as they edge toward adulthood. Kaito is also haunted by his father's move to Tokyo after his birth, while Kyoko cares for her mother, who is terminally ill.

Naomi Kawase directed and wrote the film, and produced it with Luis Miñarro and Masa Sawada. It followed her 2011 work 3.11 A Sense of Home Films and came before Sweet Bean, Radiance, The Moon, True Mothers and Yakushima's Illusion. Nijiro Murakami and Junko Abe play Kaito and Kyoko, with Miyuki Matsuda, Tetta Sugimoto, Makiko Watanabe and Jun Murakami in supporting roles. A co-production between Japan, France and Spain, it runs 121 minutes.

On IMDb it holds 6.7/10 from around 3,200 votes, and on TMDB 6.7/10 from a much smaller number of votes, indicating a modest but consistent audience response. A critics' rating of 5.7/10 from 23 reviews is somewhat lower than those audience scores.