Synopsis
In Japan, after the unprecedented tsunami in 2011 that left twenty thousand dead and the land devastated, the departed return from the depths of the sea to haunt the living. As a colossal seawall is erected, ghost stories proliferate along the Japanese coast. The reconstruction landscape becomes an in-between world where the visible and the invisible merge.
A word from Tënk
After “La Plaie” (“A Praga”), Jérémy Perrin and Hélène Robert give us “Rising from the Tsunami”, their second feature-length documentary. Again, human relationships with their environment are at the heart of the film. After the 2011 tsunami in Tohoku, a coastal region in the north east of Japan, the authorities decided to build immense breakwaters to protect the inhabited regions from new waves. But in doing so, they separate the inhabitants from their natural environment and, visibly, hamper the smooth flow of lost souls. The breakwaters emerge for what they are, representing the pursuit of humans’ desire to extract themselves from their environment.
Brieuc Mével
Coordinator of the network of popular education for environmental and sustainable development
