Berlinale 2012, day 1 (the mayor without a town)

It is again that time of the year where I fumble for words sitting half-awake, trying to remember what the movie was about and trying to convey what the staff actually said during Q&A, enjoy!

Nuclear Nation
Japan 2012, Funahashi Atsushi, 145′

After being swallowed by the tsunami and receiving a hefty dose of radiation from the neighbouring Fukushima Daiichi the 1400 residents of Futaba evacuate to an abandoned school in the suburbs of  Tokyo. The mayor now without a town desperately attempts to keep the community together, spread optimism, and to understand what happened. Once an enthusiastic advocate of atomic energy, he is now forced to experience how the victims are fobbed off with banalities, insubstantial apologies and directionless policies. Days pass with little concerts, wrestling matches and other little events to distract from the absurd reality such as a painfully rushed visit of two hours into the exclusion zone, arranged for the residents to salvage and mourn.

Unlike Yanaka Boshoku this was completely no-frills: pure documentary, no narrator, almost no music. The narrative was subtly evoked through the choice of residents speaking out throughout the film. While at first it just portrayed the grief and sense of loss it slowly shifted to show the humiliation and resignation people had to endure, although a good part was able to move out of the school into temporary or even permanent housing, moving on with their lives. Something about the first part was very touching; even though he just let the residents speak showing them as regular country folk, not idealised people, their incredible sense of loss was absolutely gripping, no one even cried on screen, they just calmly talked about what they lost be it relatives, friends or possessions. The music was very minimal, consisting of a few wind instruments and a piano only serving as a gentle background to the scenery shots of a devastated coast.  Amazingly, the ending theme “for Futaba” was composed and played by none other than Ryuichi Sakamoto!

After quite a long round of applause the director thanked the audience very sincerely as this was the world premiere and he finished cutting only six days earlier and actually literally brought the finished copy inside his backpack, fuelling a lot of anxiety with the Berlinale staff. The mayor actually wanted to come to Berlin together with the director, but he was forced to stay behind to attend talks with the government to oppose a radioactive waste dump in Futaba. Instead we watched a video message, recorded jsut four days earlier where he greeted the audience in German (so cute!) and held a short speech about his complete and utter turnaround on nuclear energy. The notion to make a film about the residents of Futaba actually came about in two ways: Funahashi had scheduled to shoot a film (a love story, heh) in early April, however this was a classic example of wrong time and wrong place as not only the earthquake happened when it did but the filming location was supposed to be the coast of Touhoku. Having no job he thought about what he could do and came to the realisation that his life-long wish to somehow put into pictures his Hiroshima heritage (he is 2nd generation) finally had the ideal opportunity. Chance also had it, that the abandoned high school where Futaba-in-exile moved in was not far from his own home and things just went from there.