A movie on the Earth by Japanese female director Naomi Kawase was screened here on Tuesday, competing for the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm), the top prize of the Cannes Film Festival.

In the movie Futatsume no mado (Still The Water), her eighth feature film, Kawase explores the mystique of nature, like her always style.

The film is about a young couple, played by Jun Yoshinaga and Nijiro Murakami, who find a body out at sea and decide to investigate.

"Our soul is complex, vague and unpredictable. In this story I hope to see Man mature upon coming into contact with the god we call Nature," said the director.

The Japanese director likes to explore nature's "divine" influence on the human "cycle of life and death", according to the festival's official daily digest.

"Kawase's ever delicate and poetic mise-en-scene lives and breathes the soft forms of nature and the soundtrack of the natural world," commented the daily.

Highlighting the importance of the film for her, Kawase said it needs complicated skills to finish the movie.

"I think that Still The Water is the most accomplished film I've made, both in terms of the actors' performance and from the technical point of view," said the director.

"The most important thing is that this film has come about," she told reporters during a press conference accompanied by the two leading roles.

Murakami said "The shoot was hard, but it was all worthwhile because today here I am in Cannes."

Kawase is one of the two female directors whose films are selected in Competition in the current 67th edition of the Cannes Film Festival.

The other woman director is Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who presented "Le Meraviglie" (The Wonders), a story on a self-sufficient family of beekeepers.

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