entertainment

Fukushima in spotlight at Berlin film festival

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They attempted to acknowledge, but they failed in assessing the scale of the loss. I'm sorry if those who were personally affected feel offended, most of the people who worked on this at Berlinale and most of us germans in general have not been the sites of the destruction. A picture in a TV screen cannot relate the human side and the sorrow of everyone who lost family and home.

What we saw in our news in Germany we're mostly reports of the reactor, and the destroyed shoreline in close proximity to Fukushima, but only very little about the surrounding prefectures and counties. This created the false image in many peoples heads that the main disaster was the reactor breakdown, when other prefectures like Hokkaidō, Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, Ibaraki, Chiba, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Shizuoka and many others suffered just as much directly from the tsunami.

This was failed to adress propperly in our news and at the Berlinale festival (a very unfitting word). What we did see we're abandoned towns, destroyed shore cities, and many, many people living in crammed shelters, and many still living there to this day.

The event is an reminder to the german population about the many lives that we're lost in Japan in the days of the tsunami, but I wish they had not publicized an official event like this without more clearly acknowledging that the loss and suffering took place and will continue to take place not in Fukushima prefecture alone, but in all of Japan. Out of respect for those who died and for their loved ones left behind, our thoughts are with you, for what little it's worth. I wish you the strength to rebuild, and that you can return home soon.

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Hope it is in the fiction genre.

We all wish it was - but it does not come any more real than this, my friend. Come up here and have a yarn to the folk who had to move out of their hometowns. A year on, the frustration has only magnified - as has sadly the depression. Life is not - and probably never will be - the same for them again. I hope the point that they are "questioning the system" (for the first time in their lives in many cases) is examined. I applaud these Japanese filmmakers for getting the story of these people out there, and I look forward to the films' release here.

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AFP reporting; says it all really. Would have been far edgier to focus on the untold story of the massive destruction up the road, than the safe bet of selling Fukushima drama.

well I suppose he is happy by latching onto some association to say “I’m more than happy to be here because the Berlinale has got a long history of showing all those political, socially conscious films,” Atsushi Funahashi, director of “Nuclear Nation,” told AFP.

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"With slow panoramic sweeps of battered buildings by the sea, thick piles of rubble, boats lying on their side and crumpled cars, the film opens saying that images of destruction are “always difficult to digest."

Yes most of that destruction was done in the prefectures/countys next door to Fukushima.

The real epic tragedy was up the road

... which "the world deserves to know about" as it was mostly overlooked by the business of media selling and cutting from history by news editors concentrating on Fukushima which has far less devastation, although nicely preserved so easier to film later in no exclusion zones.

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The world deserves to know not just about the trail of destruction caused the tsunami but how Japan's political environment that is hampering with recovery. The language barrier has shielded Japan's political leadership from international scrutiny for long enough. It's time for everybody to see how screwed up the system is.

5 ( +6 / -1 )

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