A Frog Crosses Four Centuries — I BASHO Goes to Cyprus

In the seventeenth century, Matsuo Bashō heard a frog enter water.

The sound lasted perhaps one second.

We are still listening.

This Friday, 16 October, I BASHO by R愛 will be screened at the CinePoems Cyprus Festival in Nicosia.

The organisers received 376 submissions.

Ten works were selected.

Ours is one of them.

I like the arithmetic.

One frog.

One instant.

Centuries of distance.

376 submissions.

Ten works.

And then another room becomes quiet.

— The old pond is not old —

古池や 蛙飛び込む 水の音

An old pond.

A frog jumps in.

The sound of water.

The poem is often treated as a perfect object of stillness.

But something violent happens inside it.

A surface is broken.

The world before the splash and the world after it are not identical.

That may be why the poem keeps surviving translation.

It is small enough to travel.

— I BASHO —

I BASHO began with a question that sounds almost like a technical mistake:

Can a haiku pass into electronic music and moving image without becoming an illustration of itself?

I did not want to film a frog.

Bashō had already done the impossible part.

He made the frog permanent.

The film moves instead through contemporary Tokyo: water, bodies, repetition, urban rhythm, sudden stillness.

Christopher Bobyk's music does not accompany the poem so much as build another clock around it.

The work lasts approximately two minutes and forty-nine seconds.

The instant inside it is much shorter.

— Time behaves badly —

We speak about time as though it were a road.

Past behind us.

Future ahead.

Culture does not behave like that.

A poem written centuries ago can become more present than a notification received ten seconds ago.

Tokyo contains several centuries at once.

A person does too.

The festival's theme is time, which is appropriate, although I BASHO is less interested in chronology than recurrence.

The frog jumps.

The circles widen.

Somewhere else, much later, somebody hears the water.

— The ending —

There was a small exchange with the festival about the ending of the film.

It arrives suddenly.

Then silence.

The organisers wanted to make sure this was intentional.

It is.

A haiku does not explain what happens after the frog enters the pond.

The circles continue.

The poem stops.

The listener does not.

Silence is not missing material.

It is part of the work.

— A geography nobody designed —

The route of this piece may be my favourite part.

Bashō writes in Japan.

Centuries pass.

A Ukrainian artist encounters the poem.

Christopher builds an electronic sound-world around it.

Tokyo becomes image.

Hanin Azizah, working from Indonesia, helps carry the project through the practical conversation with the festival.

And now the work travels to Cyprus.

Nobody designed that map in advance.

Perhaps culture is not a territory at all.

Perhaps it is transmission.

Something moves.

Someone receives it.

Changes its material.

Passes it on.

On 16 October, a frog will jump into another room.

We will listen for the water.

Wednesday, 14 October 2026