'Hanabi' ('Fire Flower') premieres in Locarno's Concorso Cineasti del Presente section “When you begin again, you repeat everything,” reflects experimental filmmaker Ana Vaz, thinking of her home country Brazil and the setting of her new feature, “Hanabi,” in Japan. It needs catastrophe in order to exist.” In 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. Vaz had been filming Japan for two years when she first encountered the work of Yoko Hayasuke in a French essay anthology entitled “Fukushima et ces Invisibles.” The Brazilian experimental filmmaker was interested in the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami through Hayasuke’s micropolitical lens, which transformed quotidian observations on capitalism into “metaphysical troublings.” “What do you consume?
Where do you go?” asks Vaz, rephrasing Hayasuke, questioning the proliferation of post-modern uncertainties. All of these minor, everyday events gain a completely different dimension when reconsidered.” “Hanabi,” Vaz’s heretofore longest film, loosely adapts Hayasuke’s “Journal of a Radioactive Brain,” 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’s scrambled structure, with Hayasuke’s diary entries addressed in the second person to herself in a non-linear assemblage.
The only intervention from the director to the script’s content is a slip of the tongue while reading aloud Hayasuke’s “I would rather be a zombie than a mother.” In the same breath, Vaz unconsciously responded with, “I would rather be a mother than a zombie.” She had just discovered she was pregnant while recording the narration. Chaghig Arzoumanian, the film’s editor, insisted that they keep it in. This is also the first film for which Vaz has ceded editing responsibilities.
As a film so devoted to marginal subjectivities, “Hanabi” teeters on the brink of incoherency, a dance woven into both the text and Vaz’s adaptation. The director credits Arzoumanian with much of the final film’s success. As Hayasuke’s text struggles against a regime of silence in Japanese society, Vaz’s 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’s oral testimonies with Hayasuke’s plea to not speak alone in the book’s literary prose. There are many other films that were done in parallel, but they’re all related to one another. I think they’re all part of the same disquiet.” A persistent tick accompanying the film’s improvised jazz soundtrack composed by Nuno da Luz evokes atomic histories and Geiger counters, atop eerily empty visions of the urban landscape in Japan.
There is a version of it now that we can see in the cinema. But everything surrounding it continues to live.”
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