Ana Vaz’s ‘Hanabi’ seeks lucidity in the aftermath of nuclear catastrophe

Brazilian film maker Ana Vaz. Anthony Francin

The nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan is the focus of the Brazilian director's film, which won a Special Jury Mention at the Locarno Film Festival. She tells Swissinfo why cinema should slow viewers down, challenge perception, and confront the systems that normalize catastrophe.

The Brazilian filmmaker Ana Vaz avoids describing her work as “experimental.” She prefers the more capacious “cinema-poetry,” which acknowledges her films’ subversiveness without attaching a label that, in her view, has been weighed down by a stale formalism.

But even then, “of course, formal and narrative challenges are essential, otherwise cinema would suffocate to death,” Vaz tells Swissinfo at the world premiere of her latest feature Hanabi, which won a Special Jury Mention at this year’s Concorso Cineasti del Presenti in Locarno. “‘She’s experimental’ sounds a bit like ‘she’s crazy,’” she says.

Conceived and shot over the course of ten years, Hanabi concerns itself primarily with the aftershocks of the Tohoku earthquake, which devastated several communities in Japan in 2011.

‘Hanabi’ means literally ‘fire flower’ in Japanese, or ‘fireworks’, displayed prominently in the film’s poetic montage. Tambores, A Noite And Les Volcans

Despite casting a wide geographical net –– the film opens in Tokyo and moves to smaller islands, through Brazil, and back to Tokyo –– Vaz’s main focus is Fukushima, the site of the nuclear disaster caused by the earthquake. Using a combination of archival and original footage, Vaz sets out to depict a range perspectives on life in a radioactive environment.

This diversity of experience is anchored by a voice-over, narrated by Vaz, that directly addresses the viewer. She calls the text a “savage adaptation” of the Japanese writer Yoko Hayasuke’s Journal of a Radioactive Brain, a diary account of the anxiety and fear Hayasuke experienced in the wake of the nuclear catastrophe.

At the film’s outset, Vaz includes some correspondence between herself and Hayasuke, going over the particularities of their project. In an e-mail, Hayasuke gives Vaz one condition: her writing must not be reproduced in Japanese, a language in which she has lost faith.

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Gaslit women’s voices

Vaz first came across Hayasuke’s work in Fukushima et ses invisibles, an anthology of writings about the nuclear disaster that appears in French, which means her adaptation went through several layers of translation: from Japanese to French to English, and from the page to the screen. The film maintains Hayasuke’s diaristic structure, following the writer’s musings as they move through time, sometimes chronologically and sometimes not.

Losing faith in the Japanese language: writer Yoko Hayasuke. 河西遼/Ryo Kasai

Diaries occupy a special place in the history of women’s literature –– for the many long centuries when the notion of a “woman writer” seemed impossible, brilliant minds found their outlets in autobiographical accounts of daily life.

As windows into the texture and context of women’s lives at any given time and place, these diaries are political records that illustrate the arc of women’s progress, or lack thereof. Hayasuke’s journal, Vaz explains, “does not address the catastrophe through macropolitics; it does so through micropolitics.”

Hayasuke writes in the second person, a departure from autobiographical convention that Vaz notes is in keeping with Japanese language customs, in which the singular “I” is not the default. Combined with the observant camera and Vaz’s voice-over, the second person effectively implicates the viewer in the conditions that afflict the film’s narrator, while Vaz embodies her perspective through image. “I wondered if we could think of a cinematographic device that would dislocate the gaze away from the eyes, to the body,” Vaz says. “I wanted the embodiment to be real, not just an impression.”

Scene of ‘Hanabi’: filmed as a diary, but not following a strict chronology. Tambores, A Noite and Les Volcans

How to let loose a film

Despite its prominence in the film, Hayasuke’s perspective is only one of many that compose Hanabi. In conversation with Vaz, Hayasuke made a request: “Don’t let me speak alone.”

If Hayasuke’s journal places Hanabi in a lineage of women’s autobiographical writing, its thematic concern with hysteria cements its feminist point of view. Throughout her diaries, Hayasuke describes the experience of being essentially gaslit by institutional forces that dismiss her anxieties about radioactivity as paranoia. “It’s a film about madness,” says Vaz. “And about how every level of the system-world –– the patriarchy, the state, the family, the doctor –– is there to normalize catastrophe. What madness does is tell you that no, there is in fact something wrong. It’s a form of lucidity.”

So, Vaz set out to find people whose lives had been affected by radioactivity. One woman returns to a contaminated house in which she can no longer live to tend to the flowers that still grow in her garden, despite its hazardous conditions. A man, working as a volunteer in the decontamination effort in Fukushima, wears a hidden camera in his watch to document his daily encounters with radioactivity. The weaving together of these images and lives is what “gives the film this quilted effect,” Vaz says.

Ana Vaz used footage done with a watch by an anonymous worker at the decontamination operation at Fukushima. Tambores, A Noite And Les Volcans

The interwoven perspectives, in combination with Hayasuke’s diaries, set the film’s singular rhythm. Vaz worked with an editor for the first time on Hanabi, a decision that came in part from the challenge –– one of the biggest in her career, she says –– of “sewing together worlds that were separated by various political, traditional, mediatic instances: The victims from the thinkers, the territories said to be contaminated from the ones said not to be.”

Vaz emphasizes the role of her editor, Chaghig Arzoumanian, in working out the film’s tempo: “Chaghig spent a day with me, talking at length, and then told me to leave and come back in ten days. I was like, what? She told me to just go. I thought she was right that I had to learn to trust, so I came back in ten days. When I saw the first half hour of the film, I nearly fell off the chair. I asked her, how did you know this was the film that had to be born? And she said: ‘Don’t you trust your own images? It’s all there.’”

Thinking, not contemplating

Hanabi opens with a tense tone: To the beat of a jazzy score, we move through landscapes, lives, and the narrator’s increasingly frustrated encounters with doctors who insist on the irrationality of her fear. Then, the film shifts into a contemplative register.

In an approximately seven-minute-long sequence, we watch the sun travel from the sky into the water. When told that, at a screening of the film, the audience became palpably impatient during this sunset, Vaz is amused. “We live in a world where speed is imperative,” she says. “It’s so surreal that, increasingly for me, the insistence on slowing down is of an existential and political order. Why can’t you watch a sunset for seven minutes?”

A long sunset, a time for reflection – and also to absorb the voice of “Mrs. Zombie” that conducts the film’s narrative. Tambores, A Noite And Les Volcans

This hypnotic sunset sequence prepares the viewer for the ruminative images that wind down the film. It is precisely this kind of cinematic manoeuvre that might lead some to think of Hanabi as the type of film that would be better suited to a museum than a movie theatre. But that’s not how Vaz sees it.

“Cinema is nothing more than the ability of an instrument that mediates between world and perception to allow us to relate to and observe that world,” she says. “That’s not just contemplation, it’s active thinking. To say –– as many will say –– that it’s visual arts, or literature… No! It’s pure cinema. But it’s a kind of cinema that will invite you to participate in a process of interpretation on every level.”

Edited by Catherine Hickley & Eduardo Simantob