Greetings from Fukushima

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Movie
Original title Greetings from Fukushima
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2016
length 104 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Doris Dörrie
script Doris Dörrie
production Molly von Fürstenberg
music Ulrike Haage
camera Hanno Lentz
cut Frank Mueller
occupation

Greetings from Fukushima is a German feature film from 2016, which illuminates the topic of loss and personal guilt against the background of the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011 and the subsequent nuclear disaster in Fukushima . It is about the relationship between two dissimilar women, the old geisha Satomi and the young Marie, who each overcome their own life crises and thereby become friends. "What if I lose everything that is dear to me?" Asks Marie as a leitmotif in one of the first shots.

The film was shot at the original locations. As a black and white film, it combines contemporary original recordings of the tsunami with quasi-documentary images from the disaster area and from survivors, the residents of a “Temporary Housing Community” in Minamisōma .

content

Marie travels to Fukushima Prefecture for the organization Clowns4Help / Clowns Without Borders after her wedding and a suicide attempt . There she meets Satomi. Despite warnings, she wants to return to her devastated house in the exclusion zone. Marie is overwhelmed with the situation in the emergency shelter and realizes that as a clown she is of no help to the survivors. On her departure to Germany, she decides at the last moment to return to the restricted area and offer her help to Satomi, who is reluctant to accept it. A friendship develops between Marie and Satomi. Satomi regrets that she no longer has a student to train as a geisha and that her songs would die with her.

Satomi tells about the day of the tsunami and her student at the time, Yuki. This saved herself on the same tree as she, but did not survive. At night the spirits of the deceased appear, including Yuki. When the ghost pursues Yuki Marie into the house, Satomi confesses that she believes she accidentally pushed Yuki off the tree that day - she certainly doesn't know.

Marie can barely prevent Satomi's suicide - she tries to hang herself on the tree from which she supposedly knocked Yuki to her death. The two decide to go on vacation, the "Radiation Vacation". Now Marie tells her story: She cheated on her fiancé two weeks before the wedding with his best friend. After this confession, Marie and Satomi meet Satomi's daughter in a pub. At home, Marie learns about the difficult relationship, the alienation between mother and daughter and the daughter's jealousy of Satomi's geisha students.

After Satomi and Marie's return, Satomi sews a doll for Yuki as a "husband" against her loneliness and asks Marie to hand it over. Yuki's ghost gratefully accepts the doll and walks away. Finally, Satomi can teach a maiko, a geisha in training, in song and dance. At this moment, Marie leaves Satomi. Before she leaves, she saws off the branch on which Satomi wanted to hang herself. At the end Satomi looks at the branchless tree with a laugh.

The film makes various references to Japanese folk beliefs, e.g. B. on the motif of the cat (cf. Bakeneko , Maneki-neko and Nekomata ) and on fictional spirit beings - so Yuki can be interpreted as the spirit of the dead ( Yūrei or Onryō ).

reception

The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote that the initial didactic of the film was reminiscent of the show with the mouse , but that it also had wonderful dialogues. The encounter with one of the old survivors, the last geisha from Fukushima, not only puts Marie but also the film on the right track.

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Film review by Karoline Meta Beisel: Where people are really bad, I feel better . In: sueddeutsche.de . March 9, 2016, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed August 12, 2017]).