Two Excursions into the Mountains (2020)

I was asked to make a short film about the ecology of mountain rivers in a particular place in Japan After I started to edit the material the idea to use Kafkas short fiction story Excursion into the Mountains gradually took over In the result in the film one actually goes on two different excursions First excursion has a responsible attitude to it we investigate the problems and search for solutions in order to learn something useful The second excursion unsettles that learning perhaps makes one forget what has just been learned Kafkas Excursion into the mountains suddenly emerged in a strange light when I stopped to think about the mountains as an allegory After placing words of the story over the images to which they could rather literally refer an unexpected environmental reading of the story appeared The mountain started to talk and not being talked about the insects the river the sand and the plants read Kafka aloud