Back to Fukushima

Poetic documentary about the town of Namie, which was evacuated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Now the Japanese government has built ‘renewal housing developments’. The sparse residents live their lives with a quiet dignity and take care of the place with little gestures of hope and beauty. But underneath, there is anger.  

More than ten years after the nuclear disaster, in the town of Namie in Fukushima, new ‘decontaminated’ neighborhoods are emerging from a still contaminated landscape. While the rest of the town is deserted after the evacuation in 2011, ‘the new town’ doesn’t attract many people. The few residents are mostly elderly. Underneath the dignified way they lead their lives, calmly and with humour dealing with the difficulties of their situation, there is a big anger.

In this intimate and poetic documentary by Thomas Licata we meet a woman who tends to the plants in the village and shows us around the contaminated areas where she grew up. ‘“Sad” doesn’t begin to express how I feel’, she says. We meet aman measuring the contamination levels in plants and vegetables. When they’re safe, he serves them as dinner for a group of friends. And a farmer who cannot bring himself to slaughter his livestock, which is unfit for consumption. He renamed his farm ‘The Farm of Hope’. ‘Let’s face it: this place is hopeless’, he says. ‘But the concept of hope is something you create yourself.’