Nuclear Nation II
Futaba Kara Toku Hanarete Dainibu
DIRECTOR: Atsushi Funahashi COUNTRY: Japan YEAR: 2014 LANGUAGE(S): Japanese SUBTITLES: English RUNNING TIME: 114 min
SEKTION: Internationales Forum 2015
SYNOPSIS
Futaba is the village that lies closest to the nuclear reactors of Fukushima. It is still uninhabitable today and villagers still live in temporary accommodation. This is a fascinating long-term documentary about the desperate situation of those people who have had to pay an extremely high price for Japans’s nuclear policy, a sensitive film that centers on the victims of an unforeseeable technology.
In NUCLEAR NATION Atsushi Funahashi accompanied the villagers into their exile. In this sequel he examines their situation today, four years after the disaster. Many are still living in emergency accommodation. It is now clear that they will never be able to return to their homes. Instead, huge amounts of poisonous waste are being stored in their former village.
What does it mean to have to leave one’s home? A member of an old established family of Futuba talks of his home with tears in his eyes, of the parties they had there, of all the generations who lived there. Another woman talks about the temporary accommodation where people can hear their neighbors going to the bathroom. On top of this, the initial solidarity is beginning to wane and there are problems with the old inhabitants of their new “home”.
ATSUSHI FUNAHASHI
Atsushi Funahashi was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1974 and graduated from Tokyo University with a B.A. in Cinema Studies. He moved to New York in 1997 and studied film directing at the School of Visual Arts. BIG RIVER (2006), produced by Office Kitano, was shown in various film festivals (including Berlin, Pusan and Shanghai) and was distributed worldwide. Funahashi moved back to Tokyo in 2007. DEEP IN THE VALLEY (2009), his first Japanese film, NUCLEAR NATION (2012) and NUCLEAR NATION II (2014) were all invited to Berlin Film Festival.
FILMOGRAPHY
Echoes (2002), Big River (2005), Deep in the Valley (2009), Nuclear Nation (2012), Cold Bloom (2013), Nuclear Nation ll (2014)
PRODUCER: Yoshiko Hashimoto CAMERA: Yutaka Yamazaki, Atsushi Funahashi EDITOR: Atsushi Funahashi MUSIC: Haruyuki Suzuki
PRODUCTION: Documentary Japan, Big River Films WORLD SALES: Yaël Chouraqui, Wide House