Many documentaries have been made about the nuclear-plant disaster in Fukushima and its aftermath, but relatively few feature films. One reason could be seen in the rough handling local critics gave "Kibo no Kuni (The Land of Hope)," Sion Sono's 2012 film set in a near-future Japan that has again experienced a massive earthquake and reactor meltdowns, having apparently learned nothing from the last time. It was, certain critics complained, too soon for such a fictional treatment, like making a Holocaust drama in 1946.
Undeterred, veteran documentarian Nao Kubota has set his first feature film, "Ieji (Homeland)," in post-3/11 Fukushima. Screened in the Panorama section of this year's Berlin Film Festival, "Homeland" is totally unlike Sono's over-amped but impassioned film. Somehow, I think its restrained approach and elegiac tone will strike the aforementioned critics as more appropriate to its subject matter. That is, it's more like "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," Vittorio De Sica's somberly tragic 1970 drama about a wealthy Jewish family in Fascist Italy, than Steven Spielberg's 1993 "Schindler's List," with its disturbing depictions of Nazi horrors, that has been criticized for "Hollywoodizing" the Holocaust.
Based on an original script by Kenji Aoki, "Homeland" depicts the effects of the disaster on a local farming family, but its story of betrayal, discord and alienation could have unfolded elsewhere in Japan — or the world. Meanwhile, the radiation from the crippled reactors nearby, unseen and insidious, casts a pall of death and defeat over everything. Elegies, I was reminded, may be beautiful — but they're also delivered at funerals.
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