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Few places have turned their relationship to materials into an artform like Japan —— Rice, paper, ceramics, wood, and lacquer have coexisted for millennia and given rise to a profound culture of packaging in which equal care is given to the wrapping of eggs as there is to constructing an imperial palace. Yet, one material has emerged as a bigger threat than perhaps any other before it: Plastic.

Behind the camera are two artists from Europe, photographer and filmmaker Sybilla Patrizia and artist Clementine Nuttall who, after moving to Tokyo, fall in love with traditional Japanese crafts like kintsugi, which celebrates repair and reuse over purchasing something new, and the art of traditional Japanese wrapping, in which packaging one’s heart and the consideration for others becomes more important than the gift itself.

Even though sustainability and SDGs have become of the greatest buzzwords of the past few years, Japan’s modern-day life has lost its connection to those values that embodied the core of sustainability: From individually packaged slices of fruit, to millions of plastic bottles; Japan is today’s unrivaled king of plastic. Each person generates more single-use plastic here than almost any other country in the world.

Puzzled by the fact that despite being one of the world’s biggest plastic polluters, Japan also hosts the answers to some of the biggest questions of how to achieve true sustainability, Patrizia and Nuttall go on a deep-dive across the mountains, oceans and waste facilities of Japan. Meeting with waste workers, scientists, traditional craftsmen and designers, they discover that the same love for wrapping that led Japan into this crisis, may hold the very key we’ve been looking for to prevent us all from drowning in a plastic-wrapped future….