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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.
Premiere 30.10.2008, Theatre Kampnagel, Hamburg
Everything Will Be Different – An Utopian Recollection is a live documentary performed on stage as the result of months of research and exploration by the director Thorsten Trimpop into biographies which have 1968 as their starting point. The work looks at both sides of the Iron Curtain and blends film, sound material and four different stories, recollections and views into a collage about utopias of freedom, memory and dealing with one’s own history.
With:
Gisela Getty
Jutta Winkelmann
Václav Trojan
Ivan Hartl
Director, text and research...............Thorsten Trimpop
Assistance and dramaturgy..............Christa Hohmann
Video........................................................Rebecca Riedel
Stage........................................................Christin Vahl
Production: Kampnagel Hamburg, Archa Theathre Prague, Sophiensäale Berlin, as part of the project “68/89 – Art.Contemporary.History -- with the support of the German Federal Cultural Foundation
Everything changes when Suse‘s boyfriend Matthias escapes the GDR with her best friend Susanne. The year is 1987, both just turned twenty and their life that was actually just beginning is brutally disrupted. The escape fails. Matthias and Susanne get arrested und Suse is left behind on her own. It‘s not until sixteen years later that the three of them are finally ready to see each other again. They return to the places of their past. The film shows how Matthias and Susanne walk through the frontier forest in Czechia. How Susanne stands in her former prison cell, how the three of them slowly retrieve their unequal lives and how painful the memory even after twenty years still is. It shows how friendship turned into deep distrust. “What can one possibly say in a moment like this?“, Matthias asks his former friends on their reunion. They have turned into strangers in the meantime – leaving just the little rest of collective past to connect their lives.
with:
Susanne Stochay
Susanne Lautenschläger-Ley
Matthias Melster
Director / Writer: Thorsten Trimpop
Cinematography: Hanno Kunow
Editor: Sarah J. Levin
Consultant: Helke Misselwitz
Sound: Sebastian Kleinloh
Sound Design: Florian Beck
Composer: Michael Jakumeit
Festivals (selection)
51st International Film Festival Berlin – Forum of New Cinema (WP)
45th Vienna International Film Festival
20th International Documentary Film Festival München
16th International Documentary Film Festival Marseilles
7th Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine
19th International Film Festival Amsterdam
11th International Film Festival Pusan
12th International Film Festival Calcutta
46th International Film Festival Taipeh
Critiques / Statements
Jury International Federations of Film Societies Berlin International Film Festival:
Thorsten Trimpop narrates deep dramatic wounds, linking the past with the present. The story of three people is told not only in their own words, but also through his filmmaking techniques. He allows silence to fill the frame. When he lingers on details or on the friends' faces, significant meaning is added to what is being said.
Hollywood Reporter The director manages to obtain intensely personal footage as his subjects revisit this painful episode in their past on camera. There is no attempt to reconstruct the drama of the escape. The real drama is in the faces and body language of the participants, which reveals three extremely haunted individuals.
Screen International In 1987, the attempt by two young East Germans to escape to the West failed. They consequently endured prison sentences and psychological torture at the hands of the country's secret police. How that episode still affects their lives, and that of a former friend they left behind, is the subject of Thorsten Trimpop's gripping documentary.
Varity “The Irrational Remains" is a powerful study of how politics can permanently damage the psyche. The films strongest card is in its decision not only to focus on the awful adventures of the two escapees, but also on the complex emotions of the one who stayed behind.
Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin In good documentaries, time is not just length, but something arises that is not easy to pronounce, cannot even be properly named. A strange depth of field. Trimpop draws the psychogram of a broken love, a lost friendship. Matthias, Susanne, and Suse remember each other for themselves. Not only does the individual story of three people emerge, because it happened a thousand times like this or similar. “The Irrational Remains” tells the departure as a story of the soul.
During my first trip to the US in early September 2011, I met Mary Woronov, the former muse of Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, Richard Corman and Paul Bartel. Also famous for her notorious personal life, she spends her twilight years quietly, as a painter and writer in Los Angeles.
A meditation on the painful process of getting older and what happens when one's 15 minutes of fame are up, it's a time piece filmed in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
Format: Digital Beta, Color
Length: 20.21 Minutes
Language: English
Premiere: 55th International Filmfestival Locarno 2002 Festivals (selection) 24th Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, 31st International Film Festival Rotterdam, 51st International Filmfestival Mannheim–Heidelberg