Movie Spotlight: Prelude on the Sea

A small mouse named Aristotle sets off to sea without a purpose and without a cap. A shipwreck strands him on a remote island. Over 53 minutes he finds something he couldn’t have named when he left. Prelude on the Sea is a live-action hand puppet film, shot in the craggy coves of Kamenjak National Park at the southernmost tip of Croatia’s Istrian peninsula, and there is nothing else quite like it.

Kristin Hurst and her son Jack Dauner made it together. Hurst, a puppeteer since the early 1990s, built every puppet and the set elements. Dauner, who was 19 during production, composed and performed the score, later recorded with the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Hernando Rico. Austrian public broadcaster ORF Burgenland profiled them as an artist duo under the headline “Mutter und Sohn als Künstlerduo.” The film received a nomination for best feature film at the 2025 International Sound and Film Music Festival, competing against entries from 92 countries.

The place came first

Hurst found Kamenjak while on vacation and knew immediately. “My mind just exploded,” she says. “This is the place.” The park is a protected nature reserve at the very tip of the Istrian peninsula, its rocky coastline carrying what Hurst describes as a “stark sense of timelessness.” She had already been sitting with ideas about solitude, loss, and hope. The landscape made them concrete. Aristotle was waiting for that place to exist before he could arrive in it.

Ancient technique, real ground

Live-action puppetry is among the oldest performance forms with a documented history, reaching back roughly 5,000 years. What distinguishes Hurst’s approach is the setting: the puppeteers are visible in the actual landscape, not on a controlled studio stage. Jack appeared in the landscape many times as a performer alongside his mother. Miniature sets were integrated with real footage from what Hurst calls “a big messy garden.” The balance of handmade and digital is, in her account, exactly what gives the film’s world that feeling of being both ancient and immediate.

Music as field recording

Jack began composing during the shoot. He walked through the landscape with his mother and improvised responses to what they were discovering. “He would find the music based on what the land itself was saying,” Hurst explains. The final score draws on Mahler, Holst, Ravel, and Janacek as touchstones, but the compositional process was closer to field recording than concert-hall work. Dauner is a student at the Joseph Haydn Private University in Eisenstadt, and this was his major film debut.

How do you make a mouse feel like stakes

Hurst is direct about the challenge. A non-human protagonist in a live-action format raises what she calls “daunting considerations,” the central one being how to generate suspense and feeling when the main character is a small rodent. Her answer was to trust the particularity of Aristotle himself. He is not a symbol or a stand-in. He is specific. “He is also very small,” she notes, without irony. The film stakes its emotional register on one creature’s very particular search.

What to know before you press play

This is a slow film and it knows that. Hurst hopes viewers come away with “a kind of timeless quality,” a feeling of having spent time inside the world of a small living being. “You feel washed and refreshed,” she says, which is a reasonable description of what Kamenjak itself tends to do to people who go there. Aristotle the mouse is, for the record, purely fictional. And the fact that he shares his name with one of history’s most famous philosophers is, Hurst assures us, “purely coincidental.”

Drama

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Streaming now on Relay.