Hanabi ★★

A self-absorbed, sensorial film about the long shadow of a catastrophe, Ana Vaz‘s second feature tries to grasp the trauma and pain lingering after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear event through a deliberately distanced lens. Approaching the threefold disaster through footage shot in the landscapes and communities shaped by the seismic occurrence, the Brazilian filmmaker constructs what might be called an anti-ethnography: a fragmented collage on contamination and repressed memories in which the radioactive fallout is just one of many toxic forms of residue. An endless stream of blurred footage only nominally connected to the historic crisis and an acquaintance’s exploration of it serve as the foundation of a fleeting filmic epigraph. 

Hanabi places human testimony alongside scars in landscapes, poisoned animals, polluted plants, and a lingering feeling of uncertainty as to if and how these things will affect individuals. Ostensibly, the one individual at the center of this account is author Yoko Hayasuke, whose messages to Vaz, typed onto the black screen, suggest that she tried to grapple with her own experiences and memories in her writing. However, she apparently felt that the Japanese language itself had somehow been affected, as if trace amounts of radiation could somehow settle in words and characters, channeling their deadly rays like a toxic echo. It’s a fascinating, complex idea but unfortunately not elaborated upon.

Part of the reason for this is apparently that Vaz is all too eager to take her acquaintance up on her offer to use her literary fragments in her own work. How much of the text that the director recites off-screen—while an often arbitrary and repetitive stream of out-of-focus imagery pours over the screen—is her own remains obscure. Shot in Japan over a period of ten years, the footage’s geography is disorientingly expansive, connecting the contaminated fields of Fukushima with the dense urban environment of Tokyo and the remote Ogasawara Islands. The epicenter of this erratic excursion is Fukushima as a sealed-off, historic, metastasizing monument. While the place, its name, and the catastrophe seem eternally fused, this cemented connection doesn’t prevent its impact from spreading. 

Far from new or groundbreaking, this conclusion is handed down to the audience in tediously drawn-out bits, as if presenting it conclusively would diminish its intellectual impact. Horror disperses through bodies, memories, economies, and ecosystems, while the ordinary business of living continues. Tokyo expands; new land replaces contaminated territory; islands appear from the ocean. Trying to mark the unstable boundary between observation and speculation, Hanabi withdraws into abstraction. Voices and testimonies accumulate, but no overarching trajectory emerges. Involuntarily, this fragmentation evokes a term brought up by Hayasuke: tendeneko (津波てんでんこ). 

If a tsunami occurs, run to high ground, don’t turn back for anyone. The historic context may be Japanese, but the sentiment is universal: In the end, everyone is alone. Just as nothing is as isolating as the loss that only fully materializes after the actual catastrophe. The grainy cinematic catalogue fails to come up with anything that adequately presents, let alone transcend such concepts. The intentionally “arthouse” aesthetic draws attention away from the supposed themes, buried under arbitrary association. Metaphorical mannerisms can’t grasp the lingering psychological marks of destruction. In the Q&A, after the Locarno premiere, Vaz refers to Hanabi as a dialogue. Monologue would be more fitting.