Two Excursions into the Mountains

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 Kafka’s 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. Kafka’s “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.