Michelangelo Frammartino’s extraordinary 2010 reflection on the circle of life makes a welcome return to the ICA – marking the release of his new film Il Buco, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival.

A lonely goatherd lives high on a hill in Calabria, nearer the end of his life than the start. He trades the milk from his diminished herd for dust gathered from the floor of his village church, which he mixes with water and drinks in the belief that it will improve his ailing health. As he does so, time passes and the seasons change around him. Apparently inspired by Pythagoras’s conceit that we have four lives within us – animal, mineral, vegetable, human – and so we must know ourselves four times, Frammartino creates a feature that is at once spare, haunting and utterly unique.