CH.FILM

Half-life in Fukushima Japan, Switzerland 2016 – 61min.

Movie Rating

Half-life in Fukushima

Movie Rating: Geoffrey Crété

Japan, 2011. A tsunami devastates the Fukushima region and damages the nuclear power plant, causing the evacuation of the entire population within a radius of several dozen kilometers. Five years later, one man still lives there: Naoto Matsumura. While the area is still far from risk-free, he continues his life in a landscape transformed by the lack of people and the ongoing decontamination work...

Five years ago, Fukushima turned from an ordinary city into a modern otherworld with an abandoned and poisoned countryside, its inhabitants pushed away for generations. The presence of Naoto Matsumura (and thus, the camera come to film him) is eminently strange and fascinating: in an apocalyptic landscape, as authorities in over their heads try to regain control of nature, one man lives unmoved – or almost. Within the space of an hour, the documentary Half-Life in Fukushima tries to capture the silent horror, thanks mainly to the amazing sounds that try to imagine the unimaginable. The filmmakers capture the ruined landscape, where life finds one way or another to persist. Too bad, however, that the movie does not go further in its approach, giving the impression of an interrupted work.

03.04.2024

3

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kenneth_sarocky

7 years ago

"Half-Life in Fukushima" is half of a documentary. Long, boring shots of an evacuated city and countryside, a few uninformed comments about "radiation", and glances of demolition and garbage pickup, with no explanation or attempt at fact finding. People living and working in the area show that the evacuations were an over-reaction to minimal radiation danger; slow clean-up of Tsunami damage is ruining the area as a human habitation. Overall, there's the alarmist "environmental" mentality implying that the Nuclear Power plant somehow caused the Earthquake/Tsunami.Show more


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