FURUSATO 古里 (2011-16)
Furusato 古里 reveals the unusual relationship between a landscape and its inhabitants. Over the course of a thousand years, the exuberant nature of Japan’s eastern coast has become interwoven in the lives of its people. Here, the earth is sacred—but now, it is tainted with the invisible danger of radiation. For those who have decided to stay, the rural scene surrounding the crippled Fukushima Daiishi nuclear power plant remains the place they call home – their furusato, the first place they experience as children and the last one they will see before they die. A monumental portrait of a wounded community and an unsparing look at the human cost of progress, the film illuminates the four years that followed the worst nuclear disaster of our time. Here, no one measures in half-lives. This is about eternity.
Festivals
59. International Festival for Documentary and Animated Film DOK Leipzig 2016 - Competition WP
57. International Vienna Film Festival –– Viennale
15. International Documentary Film Festival Helsinki – DocPoint
55. Ann Arbor International Film Festival
32. Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara
13. New Berlin Film Award
20. Newburyport Documentary Film Festival
15. Independent Film Festival Boston
19. International Film Festival Rio de Janeiro
Awards
Best Feature Film Competition at the 10th Newburyport Documentary Film Festival
Winner Competition Long Documentary DOK Leipzig
Golden Dove Jury Statement:
Although Germany has decided to phase out nuclear power, a nuclear power plant will still be built in Poland near the German border. Besides Chernobyl has already irradiated a quarter of the world for centuries. The way how one of the world’s most important industrial nations handles the reactor catastrophe of Fukushima, how this nation is unable to cope with it until this very day and how it continues to fail to come to terms with it day by day – all this has the director and his courageous team packed into an impressive documentary piece of cinematic art in an unsettling, disturbing and highly complex way. Moreover, the film also shows how survivors cannot, or do not want to, leave their native area, with foreseeable consequences for their own health and that of future generations, and how this people – whether old or young – are being fed with hopes and lies and left to themselves. This film is an excellent example of a warning against an actually inconceivable sample of similarly inhuman, undemocratic, suicidal events on our planet, the only one we have.
Team
Writer / Director / Cinematographer: Thorsten Trimpop
Editor: Stefan Oliveira-Pita
Producer: Tobias Büchner
Sound: Björn Wiese
Music: Benedikt Schiefer
Critique (select)
TAZ (Die Tageszeitung, Berlin) “Furusato” is a precise study of a culturally specific way of dealing with your own place in the world.
Süddeutsche Zeitung Masterly and cautiously directed, and precisely for that reason so overwhelming.
EPD Film Only gradually one realizes while watching, that this film has succeeded in something that almost never succeeds: the sometimes bizarre beauty and poetry of the images is a mirror that makes the invisibility of the radiative visible indirectly.
Filmdienst Some of the silent, moving images of decay are reminiscent of images from feature films such as Andrej Tarkowski’s "Stalker" in their slow rhythm. It is this harmony of content and form that makes “Furusato” a film that is as disturbing as impressive in its cinematic power.