A
Lullaby under the Nuclear Sky: Directed by and
featuring Tomoko Kana. Running Time: 69 minutes.
Rating:
4/4
Great
cinematic documentaries are able to bring across to their viewers an
understanding of true stories that, in the details, seem almost too incredible
or “storylike” to be real. Doing so is
not an easy task. It’s also particularly
difficult for a filmmaker to turn their cameras around and make themselves the
focus of a movie without it coming across as gratuitously self-serving or
egotistical. Every now and then,
however, someone with the right story, right pathos, and right amount of
humility comes along who can pull it off.
Tomoko Kana is one of those people.
In
one of those strange twists of Fate that seem almost too strange to be
coincidence, Tomoko was born almost exactly 40 years before the disaster at
Fukushima Daiichi, on the very same day the plant began
operating. This sharing of a birthday,
plus the fact that, as a resident of nearby Tokyo, she had been partially
dependent on the plant for electricity most of her life, led to her feeling
that she had a very personal stake in the story of the disaster and its
fallout. For her, responsibility for the
event and its horrible aftereffects went far beyond just the electrical company
or the government- everyone in the region, and indeed the whole country, who
used nuclear power were culpable.
With
such a powerful sense of responsibility pushing her, she immediately starting
working on a new film project about the disaster and the initial efforts by
both the government and the electric company TEPCO to cover up just how
bad the situation was. She began
interviewing survivors and forced evacuees from the 20-km radius around the
plant, and soon found a couple that agreed to take them into their ruined house
and factory inside the zone, despite the danger of exposure to radiation.
Up
to this point, the tearful videotaped stories of the forced evacuees and scenes
of utter ruin inside the zone, as well as piles of rotting corpses of farm
animals abandoned by their owners after the meltdown, would in and of
themselves be more than enough material for years’ worth of documentary
features (and undoubtedly will be for some time). But for Tomoko, her original plans for the
film were thrown in the air wholesale right after her day-long trip inside the
zone. After lying in bed ill for days
afterwards, she was informed by the doctor that, much to her surprise and
shock, she was pregnant, and indeed had been so for several weeks prior
to going into the radiation zone around Fukushima.
Having
previously assumed that she could likely never have kids for health reasons,
any joy or relief Tomoko and her husband felt upon hearing this news was shaded
by overwhelming fear and guilt. What if
she had not only damaged her own health, but that of her unborn child by
entering the radiation zone? Her worries
were only heightened in the coming months, as it was first revealed that the
amount of radiation leaked by the reactor was higher than previously known, and
her own hometown of Tokyo was still getting much of its food shipments from the
regions close to the radiation area, further increasing the likelihood of
increased exposure for not just Tomoko’s child, but all children in that part of Japan.
From
this point on, the rest of the film mixes Tomoko’s increased activism in
coordination with other parents and health groups pushing back against official
assurances that all was well, with the increasingly painful struggles of her
pregnancy. For much of her carry time,
she was wracked with immense pains and sicknesses, and having never been
pregnant before, she became increasingly terrified that she was suffering
radiation sickness that would, in some way, do great harm to her child before
it even had the chance at life.
While
the parts of the film dealing with the greater issue of nuclear fallout and the
effects of 3/11 on Japanese society could easily stand on their own as powerful
filmmaking, what makes the film great is how seamlessly Tomoko intersperses it
with her own story. Her own take is made
more potent by how wholly she shows herself on camera; we see her weakened, hurting, beaten down, so sick that she can’t even rise from her bed. They are the sort of moments that many
experience in one form or another, but that most would never want others to see. That Tomoko opens herself to us so much,
conversely, makes her seem all the stronger, more human, and more powerful as a
result.
At
just over an hour, this film is a marvelous example of how to perfectly use the
time you have to pack a film with information, emotion, and pathos. Tomoko seeks to add her voice to the growing
chorus of criticism of how nuclear power and government transparency are
handled in Japan, and looks to amplify the voices of those usually too small or
weak for governments to pay attention to.
With A Lullaby under the Nuclear
Sky, she has succeeded brilliantly.
-Noah Franc
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