{"id":5881,"date":"2026-08-14T13:37:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T13:37:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=5881"},"modified":"2026-08-14T13:37:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T13:37:58","slug":"ana-vaz-discusses-the-impact-of-the-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-the-work-of-yoko-hayasuke-and-preferring-to-be-a-mother-rather-than-a-zombie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=5881","title":{"rendered":"Ana Vaz Discusses the Impact of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, the Work of Yoko Hayasuke and Preferring to Be a Mother Rather than a Zombie"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\t\u201cWhen you begin again, you repeat everything,\u201d reflects experimental filmmaker Ana Vaz, thinking of her home country Brazil and the setting of her new feature, \u201cHanabi,\u201d in Japan. \u201cThere\u2019s a normalization of the state of catastrophe and disaster necessary for the system to perpetrate itself. It needs catastrophe in order to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Busan Film Festival to Honor Founder Director Kim Dong-ho With Korean Cinema Award<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tIn the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Vaz felt a resonance with the preoccupations with land, people and colonialism that have defined her filmography to this point. \u201cHanabi,\u201d or \u201cFire Flower,\u201d weaves in imagery normally associated with healing \u2014 farmers, gardens and fireworks \u2014 to communicate a profound unease with the silence of present-day Japan.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tVaz had been filming Japan for two years when she first encountered the work of Yoko Hayasuke in a French essay anthology entitled \u201cFukushima et ces Invisibles.\u201d The Brazilian experimental filmmaker was interested in the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident caused by the T\u014dhoku earthquake and tsunami through Hayasuke\u2019s micropolitical lens, which transformed quotidian observations on capitalism into \u201cmetaphysical troublings.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat do you consume? Where do you go?\u201d asks Vaz, rephrasing Hayasuke, questioning the proliferation of post-modern uncertainties. \u201cTaking the plane, eating out, drinking a coffee. All of these minor, everyday events gain a completely different dimension when reconsidered.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHanabi,\u201d Vaz\u2019s heretofore longest film, loosely adapts Hayasuke\u2019s \u201cJournal of a Radioactive Brain,\u201d in which the author conveys her struggle to live in a Japan desperate to deny its permanent irradiation following the accident. The film inherits the text\u2019s scrambled structure, with Hayasuke\u2019s diary entries addressed in the second person to herself in a non-linear assemblage.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe anxious affect throughout the film allows us to be connected to something beyond a reasoned understanding,\u201d she adds. \u201cParticularly in the case of Fukushima, it seemed important to think beyond science: beyond official numbers or regular forms of measurement that are quickly surpassed through the enormity of the event.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tImagining a future after a disaster is one of the text\u2019s central preoccupations, equally intriguing Vaz. The only intervention from the director to the script\u2019s content is a slip of the tongue while reading aloud Hayasuke\u2019s \u201cI would rather be a zombie than a mother.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the same breath, Vaz unconsciously responded with, \u201cI would rather be a mother than a zombie.\u201d She had just discovered she was pregnant while recording the narration. Chaghig Arzoumanian, the film\u2019s editor, insisted that they keep it in.<\/p>\n

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\n\tThis is also the first film for which Vaz has ceded editing responsibilities. As a film so devoted to marginal subjectivities, \u201cHanabi\u201d teeters on the brink of incoherency, a dance woven into both the text and Vaz\u2019s adaptation. The director credits Arzoumanian with much of the final film\u2019s success.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was 10 years in the making, and two in which we were editing the film,\u201d Vaz said. \u201cMy brilliant editor, Chaghig, brought a great deal of sensibility and structure to this tapestry as we worked little by little.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe voiceover accompanies short interviews with survivors of the fallout and extended reveries, where Vaz waves her 16mm camera wildly through contaminated grasslands, or holds it still to observe the descent of a candescent sun into the sea \u2014 the latter observed by Vaz\u2019s previous collaborator, philosopher Juliana Fausto, as \u201ca wonderful scene to ponder\u201d midway through the film, with the sun also being the byproduct of radioactive fusions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Hayasuke\u2019s text struggles against a regime of silence in Japanese society, Vaz\u2019s adaptation works against the invisibility of radiation, attempting a number of tactics to materialize the invisible. Their greatest challenge was balancing the multiple registers of the film\u2019s oral testimonies with Hayasuke\u2019s plea to not speak alone in the book\u2019s literary prose.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m often really trying very hard for the camera not to be this instrument of appropriation and extraction that it has been in the history of cinema,\u201d elaborates Vaz. \u201cIn that sense, it\u2019s interesting that \u2018Hanabi\u2019 has accompanied me for the last 10 years. There are many other films that were done in parallel, but they\u2019re all related to one another. I think they\u2019re all part of the same disquiet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA persistent tick accompanying the film\u2019s improvised jazz soundtrack composed by Nuno da Luz evokes atomic histories and Geiger counters, atop eerily empty visions of the urban landscape in Japan. \u201cHanabi\u201d thus sounds the alarm, positing an approach to coping with the unimaginable.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn the face of continuing disasters, this need for an international network of solidarity and of thinking is extremely valuable,\u201d concludes Vaz. \u201c\u2018Hanabi\u2019 hasn\u2019t ended. There is a version of it now that we can see in the cinema. But everything surrounding it continues to live.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Golden Lion Winner Milcho Manchevski Talks \u2018Giving a Voice\u2019 to Pulse Nightclub Survivors With \u2018Good People\u2019:\u00a0\u2018Our Job Was to Stay Out of the Way\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ten years in the making, the Locarno screener adapts the work of Yoko Hayasuke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4584,4585,4586,4587,507,1906],"class_list":["post-5881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film","tag-ana-vaz","tag-fire-flower","tag-fukushima","tag-hanabi","tag-japan","tag-locarno-film-festival-2"],"yoast_head":"\nAna Vaz Discusses the Impact of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, the Work of Yoko Hayasuke and Preferring to Be a Mother Rather than a Zombie - Relocation Observer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=5881\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ana Vaz Discusses the Impact of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, the Work of Yoko Hayasuke and Preferring to Be a Mother Rather than a Zombie - 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