Sion Sono is known for making extreme films that get invited to major festivals. One is "Himizu," a drama set near the Tohoku disaster zone post-March 11, 2011, and whose abused teenage hero seethes with violent rage — and unleashes it on a classmate equally ill-treated by her parents. When it screened at the Venice Film Festival last year, its two young leads won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for outstanding performances by new actors.

Despite the accolades abroad, Sono found it hard to raise finance at home for his new feature, "Kibo no Kuni (The Land of Hope)," which depicts the human cost of a Fukushima-like reactor disaster in a rural town in the near future.

"The theme of nuclear power is still taboo in Japan," Sono explains at the office of distributor Bitters Ends, which released the film on Oct. 20. "Investors here told me, 'You can make a movie on anything you want, we'll finance it,' but when I mentioned nuclear power, they went, 'Ah, no, we can't do that,' " he says with a laugh. "I finally ended up getting the money from England and Taiwan, which for me as a Japanese is truly regrettable."