Distant lights reveal the outline of a city. Illuminated ships cross the water with sleeping people on board and the night appears to become liquid. The sower of stars wakes them and travels with them through the city. They talk about this and that – and say goodbye to everything.

Tokyo at night is dazzling, a fantasy of hypnotising lights. Observed with distance and stillness, if you let yourself be carried away by them, you can find a meditative atmosphere there. The first thing I tried to capture was this peaceful feeling, hidden within the vertigo of a megalopolis like Tokyo.

I worked on the image with two plastic references that emerged very quickly: Zen landscape painting, out of which I could underline the idea of emptiness, as well as silence and the cyberpunk aesthetics of films like BLADE RUNNER, to build futuristic neon architectures by superimposing planes.

From this atmosphere I began to think the story. I am always interested in the limbo space between life and death, imaginary and real, where the borders blur to make the spectral and dream-like emerge. I wanted the story to pass through these ideas, giving shape to it from a dialogue of disembodied voices. Voices that cross the city – limbo while being both outside and inside the image, as a kind of depersonalisation.

I constructed the dialogues from a certain poetic crypticism inspired by kōan (mystical teachings of Zen Buddhism). They gradually settled down, from readings, in a script rather by an editor than a writer, like a book of aphorisms that keeps little jewels. Very condensed thoughts related mainly to contemplation, because this was the biggest challenge for me here: to find a balance between narration and contemplation, between text and image, ensuring that they enhance each other, despite each one demands a different attention from us: one more sensitive, the other more rational.