A short film that turns language inside out and makes you feel the vertigo of it. A word reads the same forwards and backwards, but somewhere in the reversal, meaning shifts, and you realize you've been watching the same moment twice from opposite directions. The animation doesn't move much, but your understanding of what you're looking at keeps inverting until you can't trust which direction time is actually running. Built for viewers who think in layers. It costs nothing to watch and everything to unsee once you understand the trick.

A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards, but what happens when meaning splits between the two directions? This short film takes kaibun as its subject: Japanese palindromes whose words sound identical in either reading direction, with a meaning that sometimes shifts and sometimes holds. The director set out to animate that playful, poetic world of wordplay. Made as a first-year project in 2021 in the animation department of the Tokyo University of the Arts graduate film school, the piece carries a psychological genre label.