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August in the Water poster

August in the Water

1995 · Gakuryu Ishii

For a late night alone when you want to drift rather than be gripped — a film to sink into like warm water. Pure mood-bath, not comfort food and not a challenge exactly, but it asks your patience and pays it back in wonder.

What it's about

During a strange summer in Fukuoka — drought creeping in, meteors falling — a high-school diving champion survives an accident and starts to sense something vast rearranging itself around her. What begins as a story about a girl, a boy who admires her, and a city running out of water slowly opens into a science-fiction vision about her place in the universe.

The experience

Slow, radiant, and hypnotic — plot loosens its grip and atmosphere takes over, all shimmering water, cicada drone, and ambient pulse, until you feel less like you're watching it than absorbing it. It's cosmic without a wink of irony, and it leaves you in a genuinely altered, dreamlike state.

The craft

Gakuryu Ishii, who invented Japanese punk cinema on pure velocity, here reverses himself completely into stillness and light — and the control is remarkable. Hiroyuki Onogawa's ambient score fuses with water, stone, and insect noise into a single sound-world; this one rewards a dark room, good speakers, and zero distractions.

Why it matters

For decades it was almost impossible to see outside Japan, traded in murky rips like a relic, which only deepened its cult standing; it's now treasured as the summit of Ishii's second, meditative career.

Reception & legacy: how August in the Water was received, argued over, and remembered →

Gakuryu Ishii — then Sogo Ishii — invented Japanese punk cinema as a student with Crazy Thunder Road and Burst City, all velocity and shrapnel. In the nineties he reversed himself completely, and this is the summit of that second life: a slow, radiant science-fiction reverie set in Fukuoka during a strange summer of drought and falling meteors, where a high-school diving champion survives an accident and begins to sense the universe reorganizing itself around her. Plot dissolves into atmosphere — shimmering water, cicada drone, stone, static, the ambient pulse of Hiroyuki Onogawa's score — until the film seems less watched than absorbed, a cosmic vision taken entirely seriously and entirely without irony. For decades it was nearly impossible to see outside Japan, circulating in murky rips traded like relics, a scarcity that only deepened its legend among adventurous viewers; restoration finally returned its aquatic blues to full saturation. Few films argue so gently that transcendence might be a matter of light and water.

Lines of influence