Based on the short story by Anthony Doerr, with The Shell Collector Tsubota Yoshifumi sketches the life of a blind shell collector who can only survive in solitude. He doesn’t meet any people. Only one man visits occasionally to bring him shopping in exchange for money. Occasionally the shopping is also accompanied by letters from his son, but they remain unopened for now. Just like the shellfish he collects so obsessively, the man doesn’t want to know anything about the world outside his own surroundings.
Tsubota, however, slowly introduces uninvited changes in the man’s life: a contagious disease, a woman washed ashore looking for another life, a new kind of shellfish with a poisonous sting that is sublimely hallucinogenic. All these changes not only put the survival techniques of the collector to the test, but also our own ideas about the relationship between man and nature.
Film details
- Countries of production
- Japan, USA
- Year
- 2016
- Festival edition
- IFFR 2016
- Length
- 87'
- Medium/Format
- DCP
