Seeing his own features in his dead brother’s face, Shusaku loses his sense of reality. Fending off existential fears and haunting, distant howls, he is swept into a stream of memories of his younger brother – Shusaku has entered his subconscious. What makes us who we are?

Identity as a subjective whodunit for the camera. This mystery-infused and optically claustrophobic short film is based on a short story by well-known author Hyakken Uchida. Shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and shot on 16mm film, Japanese director Aya Kawazoe presents the film as a mirror of Japanese society: experiencing natural disasters and having them become normalised, the boundary between the living and the dead has been blurred. She quotes the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, “existence precedes essence”.