A new tradition is to watch at least one Tohoku Earthquake/Fukushima movie at the Berlinale. I wonder when this wave will ebb out (please excuse this incredibly horrible pun.)
Ieji (Homeland, ??)
Japan 2014, Nao Kubota, 118?
After several years in Tokyo, Jiro comes home and starts working the family farm again. It’s just that the village is completely empty because it’s in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone. Randomly, an old friend from school comes by fleeing the police and starts to live with him. Meanwhile his older half-brother Soichi with his wife, little daughter and mother-in-law live or rather vegetate in temporary housing outside the zone. The housing is so nondescript and anonymous that mother-in-law even loses her way in the rows of identical dwellings. Initially they are not aware of Jiro’s return but someday they learn about it and Soichi wonders what happened, especially because Soichi’s stepmother, Jiro’s actual mother never got over his departure while she was still alive.
I have a shitton of respect for Sakura Ando. Besides her being a great actress she is not ashamed to look ugly, crazy or incredibly mediocre and boring, as in this movie. The cinematography is your typical slow indie movie from Japan, so nothing to write home about (please excuse the punfest in this post!) however the pacing, relatively sparse dialogue and the general dynamic of the movie create a very interesting mood. The absolute carelessness and “slow suicide” (as his friend describes it) of Jiro feel weirdly compelling and nicely contrast the aimlessness and lack of hope in the temporary housing which feels highly suffocating. In the end it is a very nice and calm movie about how hard it is to completely lose your roots, to never be able to return to your home as it is just gone.