Cinema with Us 2023
- The Sound of Waves
- Tsushima: Fukushima Speaks Part 2
- Radio Shimo-Kajiro: The Songs that Led Us Here Today
Cinema with the Generation that Didn’t Experience It
There’s something I’ve noticed living in one of the regions most affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake. When I ask children to teach me what they have learned about it in school, I am impressed by the adult-like nature of the language they use, and yet at the same time something does not feel quite right.
Every year we are seeing the spread of not only some of the largest disasters in history in every corner of the world, but unprecedented epidemics and tremors in the truth. I cannot be too critical if children in places far from the capital in the country of the setting sun who do not know what happened at that time are only familiar with it as something learned in class when many adults have already relegated the disaster to a corner of their memory.
And yet their understanding of it still seems too facile. Of course it is important to pass down records and teach lessons already learned, but we can only continue forward if we examine and re-examine that which we have yet to process.
Twelve years after the Great East Japan Earthquake, the seventh Cinema with Us has come full circle. This program, which has continued to attempt to connect various people and events through documentary films, will be an opportunity to reconnect the past and the present, as well as to revise our questions towards the future.