CINEMA TYPHOON @ TKU2013 “Filming ‘Fukushima’: Diverse Memories, Multiple Representations”

This year’s “Cinema Typhoon” will present three films on the theme of people’s memories and filmic representations. Funahashi Atushi’s “Nuclear Nation”, Fujiwara Toshi’s “No Man’s Zone” and Ian Thomas Ash’s “A2″ deal with the ordinary people’s lives and feelings devastated by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station’s accident in March 2011, each of which provokes us to ponder on individual processes in which private memories are transformed into public representations, and representations recreate memories.

Only a short while after the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear ‘triple disaster’, the first filmmakers ventured to Fukushima and the Tohoku disaster areas to document the devastating effects on people’s lives. Since then, an astonishing array of documentary as well as feature films about the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster has been produced, constituting what has poignantly been called an ‘all-but-instant subgenre’ (D. Lim). Why are so many films made about the Fukushima nuclear disaster? What are the motivations of the filmmakers? In which ways might these films participate in the production of a public ‘Fukushima’ memory? How can they stem forgetting, when ‘disaster fatigue’ has already set in? Do these films affect, or seek to influence, anti-nuclear thinking and movements nationally and internationally? The panel discussion, including the directors Funahashi and Fujiwara, aims to address these and other questions pertinent to the production, screening, and reception of films concerned with the social consequences of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The discussion will be complemented with screening a small but fine selection of relevant films.Suggested Film Screenings (all of these available with English subtitles):Nuclear Nation/Futaba kara tōku hanarete (dir. Funahashi Atsushi)No Man’s Zone/Mujin chitai (dir. Fujiwara Toshi)Fukushima: Memories of the Lost Landscape/Sōma Kanka (dir. Matsubayashi Jojyu)Odayaka na nichijō (dir. Uchida Nobuteru)[Language: English and Japanese]

Dates: July 13-14, 2013
Place: Room B201 in Bldg. 2 at Tokyo Keizai Daigaku Access Map: http://www.tku.ac.jp/access/kokubunji/
Campus Map: http://www.tku.ac.jp/campus/institution/kokubunji/

For more details: http://cultural-typhoon.com/2013/en/cinema-typhoon/