Salt Lines

For fifty summers Haru has raked seawater across the salt pans of a small bay on the Noto peninsula. This year the tide comes further in than it ever has, and the village council has voted: when the season ends, the pans will not be rebuilt.

Her granddaughter Mio films everything on her phone. Every dawn raking, every drying rack, every bag of crystals, as if the footage could hold what the water is about to take. Haru lets her, and says nothing for a long time. Then she says that some things are meant to be remembered and not kept, which is not the same as saying they do not matter.

Staged scenes and generated seascapes sit side by side in pale, sun-bleached colour. The film is in no hurry. Neither is the sea.