Writer-director Yumiba Aya herself plays Yuriko, a young unattached woman who one day finds herself on the threshold of an older man’s apartment. Have they met before? It’s hard to say. They address each other with the formality of strangers. But Yuriko moves in and they begin cooking and eating together. The man shortens her name to Riko. They’re not lovers (he brings another woman back for attempted sex one night) but living together does breed a kind of intimacy—or at least dependency. The man takes her to the forest to meet his friend Koike, who lives in a tent. Then, when the man fails to come home one night, Riko is bereft… Amazingly, this deliciously enigmatic movie is Yumiba’s first-ever film work. It takes the idiom of "realism" and pushes it one or two notches up the scale—to very intriguing effect. Plays with: Permanent Land

— Tony Rayns