The Toxic Pigs of Fukushima | The Short List

[Music] today's film radioactive wild boars insane cinematography and the resilience of nature despite our best efforts to destroy it this was the perfect film to watch during a pandemic while i was hiding from the world it spoke to me in ways i did not expect it to be directed by autobell here is toxic pigs of fukushima [Music] [Music] this [Music] be [Music] by [Music] so [Music] [Music] foreign me [Music] foreign foreign taking it so me be [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] okay ugh [Music] is foreign so my [Music] foreign [Music] uh [Music] [Music] [Music] to [Music] so [Music] what's up my home [Music] [Music] i [Music] foreign they foreign foreign [Music] [Music] video foreign foreign [Music] foreign [Music] terrorists my there [Music] um foreign my my m foreign [Music] [Music] um foreign [Music] foreign foreign foreign foreign [Music] m you [Music] m [Music] [Music] do foreign be [Music] [Applause] my foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] my [Music] so [Music] so [Music] what's that [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] i foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] so so [Music] so [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] i'm very excited to have the director of toxic pigs of fukushima here with me autobell it's a very powerful film thank you nice to meet you thanks for having me why did you want to make a documentary on this subject i actually saw some very inspiring photos by toru hanai and another set of photographs by yuki iwanami and those sets of photographs really inspired me [Music] toru did a great job of photographing pigs in the street and yuki did a lot of beautiful sort of portraiture of the people who chose to remain or who had returned and it just struck me that it had a lot of great ingredients for a compelling film you know you have this very startling alien backdrop of kind of isolation and abandonment you had this wildlife aspect to it which interested me with the with the pigs themselves and then i was interested to know how the small set of people who chose to remain there what their lives were like also the kind of resilience of mother nature the return of it yeah you felt that did you i feel like hollywood tries to depict this in films about the dystopian future often yeah and then recreating these kind of scenes where yeah it's a couple of hours from tokyo and it's real and it's real [Music] so the main character of the film passed away recently yeah gorsan died of cancer you know as a result of radiation or i don't think it helped why did you choose him as the central character of the stock since the disaster these hunters had taken upon themselves to to help bring back balance uh to the environment and we were actually wrecking the pig disposal center and gorusan drove up with a ball in the back of his of his pickup one of the photojournalists who inspired the film toru hanai uh you know like a great journalist he sort of pounced on on gaurasan and started chatting away to him right he was very serious about his sense of duty as well so he was up at the crack of dawn out there in the hills all day long you know bringing 30 40 50 radiated boars down for internment you know every month so his work ethic matched what we wanted to accomplish as well he was just a a lovely man and a compelling character and i'm very sad to think of him gone actually his career was working in auto body shops and like remote control planes and motorbikes it was clear to me that nature was clawing back the marks that the humankind had left on the landscape you know everywhere we turned the vegetation was was overwhelming the man-made structures which which i think is powerful because you know we think we leave such a lasting mark and you know the pigs are really interesting kind of bell weathers for the ecosystem right because they're omnivores right so they they literally everything they root in the ground the the crops they reflect radioactive levels cesium 137 levels 300 times safety standards why what i found interesting was was how you know on the hunters on one hand feel like the explosion in board numbers is a sign that nature is out of balance and then i i spoke to a father who'd lost his daughter to the tsunami who was much more sort of reflective about the boers in the landscape and don't they have every right to be here just as we do he was at work actually in a pig farm uh and his daughter and his wife um and i believe the the grandfather were at their home which is as you saw it's right by the sea and the wave came in and uh took them he was able to find the remains i believe of his wife and his grandfather and he buried them but he's only been able to find i think he says in the film about 20 of his daughter's bones um i think a cheekbone and some other some other pieces of it how old was she seven seven name was yuna well we did actually film at a school a school with a geiger counter outside of it is a horrendous thought isn't it but um we filmed at school uh it was built for 1500 kids and there were 15 children there and all different ages you know like they combined middle school high school you know it was all sort of consolidated it was disheartening because there was a lovely old headmaster there who you know he said this is a 30 40 year recovery process you know the kids that he had in school the handful of children who were there were mostly uh the children of decontamination workers right you know who were shaving were posted and took their families with them but yeah 15 kids in a school of 1500 and the geiger counters outside so that they know like what you drop your kids off for school you know how much radiation they're going to get exposed to so why did you choose not to include that what you described as disheartening scene why didn't i include the kids they put an incredible show for us you know there was drumming they were um they were uh they had swords and they were samurai watermelons blindfolded and frankly it it felt a little too like green shoots it felt a little too joyous and not in keeping with the overriding sense of toxicity and sadness that pervades that whole atmosphere as you're describing that scene just i don't know what it's the emotion it's making me feel but it's making me feel something like just like it's all so sad you know it's it is yeah it really is sad and and somber and we've got to take it as a warning shot it's not a deliberately anti-nuclear film but i would i think i would hope it encourages you to think twice about nuclear energy right um and and just what happens when mankind's invention you know run rampant and and melt down and you know the the the aftermath of that the fallout from that it just destroys lies i watched this film at the beginning of the lockdown right here when we all started sheltering in place and i watched it and i just really related to the the stillness the isolation yeah and um it felt like this is like a great pandemic pandemic film yeah cinema yeah yeah and obviously that wasn't your intention when you were making it no no i wanted to i wanted to reflect the the feeling and the ambience that i observed there and again you know we were dealing with um with an unseen enemy right radiation you know it's not people shooting at you yeah foreign [Music] how do you give people a sense of that invisible but suffocating unseen enemy and i i try to do that through lensing and color grades and all sorts of other techniques but uh you know one way i tried to do that was by sort of doing anything i could to erode the sort of the the primacy of humankind right so there's no there's no sit-down interviews that interrupt the film right it's all kind of out of vision and that was a deliberate choice as well because you let people sit in an environment for five seconds as still life objects a largely unchanging landscape and that's an uneasy uncomfortable amount of time for people to live with a shot that has no people in it to try and give the audience a sense of of what this place felt like i mean i think we could all relate to it more because of the circumstances that we were in when we watched it i think if i watched this film a year ago maybe yeah i would have felt a little more unease while i was watching it but instead i felt like i could just really relate to it in the the stillness of it all and i don't know i'm a bit torn about that honestly because i i thought there was great potency in in these scenes of abandonment and isolation and have those been diluted now because the empty streets are now common currency kind of globally in retrospect i think these images that we saw serve as a bit of a warning shot right so we've had eight months of it these folks about eight years of it this is what it looks like if there's an absence of leadership if there is not enough thoughtfulness about people's lives and the sacrifices that they are asked to make then this is what results what was the aesthetic approach that you used for the film well i borrowed a lot with the kind of the lone hunter the the visual narrator gorusan you know i i was thinking a lot about um kurosawa's woodcutter in rochemont i was thinking about stalker in tarkovsky's 1979 film [Music] i was thinking about the kind of the lone gunslinger i was trying to create a sense of unease and eeriness uh in the landscape that we were observing that we were filming so that's why it's got this heavy almost suffocating color grade which is you know akin to what you've seen like children of men we made lens choices along those lines too i had a set of lenses made in england by richard gale that take old soviet era helios lenses and he re-houses them with modern mechanics so you get these crazy kind of off-axis flaring you get this these strange exotic defocusers they have these dramatic shifts in the color rendering of the image you see it's almost it's almost like um using expired film stock it introduces this variable that i thought might be able to imitate the sense of radiation in the air the other beautiful thing about richard gale's lenses is uh you can swap out the rear element you can put in different aperture blades right which gives you a different shaped bokeh you'll see it in some of the the scenes the defocus is square which again i would even if it's subconscious i wanted to kind of throw the audience off kilter a little bit to give them a sense of unease that this is sort of a albeit an earthly location but it feels otherworldly it feels changed and fundamentally altered yeah i think which is certainly the condition on the ground yeah see there that sort of pixelation yeah again it may just be subconscious but the idea is and there again in the right in the backdrop the defocus so that's just a square aperture blade that you slot in behind these soviet lenses and it just throws the world out of kilter a little bit it's not done in post there's there's more of an honesty to it than that it all it all happens in the camera wow that requires a lot of planning in advance like i want to go to fukushima i'm going to have lenses made with old soviet parts so i can get this specific thing did you work closely with your dp on planning that part of it yeah yeah right yeah you guys really nerded out on this yeah absolutely absolutely it's i mean i i love i love lenses and cinematography especially when you're planning a film it's like a nice it's a nice retreat it's a nice place to go in pre-production right where you can sort of just dive into the look and feel of a film and worry about the logistics and the thing which hasn't happened yet you know you can sort of segment it off so i quite like diving into that was another big influence on the cinematography in this film like i i paid homage to like his tatami shots it's tommy shot it's a lower angle it's a much lower angle than we see in western cinema it's as if you're eye level with somebody sitting on a reed mat on the floor you're honored to tell me matt exactly so the camera's down low we used a buggy to put a bit of movement into those we had a we had a buggy for filming the boars it's actually made for filming cheetahs it goes like about 45 miles an hour it's an incredible piece of kit but that allows you to get in close to the bores but i also realized it gives you the same low angle that ozu used in his tatami shots and it reshapes the center of gravity of the frame it it does lots of interesting things and then his pillow shots as well between his uh scenes he would insert almost still life you know it would be a slightly unmoving landscape um he often used them uh to comment on the increasing americanization and consume the rise of consumerism in japan you know so you'd see coke bottles um other other items almost in still life and he would tend to rest on those for about five seconds which is to say it's kind of like an uneasy uncomfortable amount of time for a shot without a person in and went to this landscape and it's it is de-peopled you know it's it it's only about four to ten percent of village villagers who've returned to to these locations i was interested in revisiting ozu's pillow shots his comments on consumerism 70 years later when they've sort of degraded and and been laid low and that's why we dwell and linger on the refuse that litters the convenience store to show you the environment where we are no longer top dog where people have been removed from the picture as well we took a lot of equipment that will allow us to remain nimble obviously drones but even like the crane that we use for crane shots you know that collapses in five minutes into a snowboard bag the ronin-s shotgun gimbal allows you to follow a hunter through woods with minimum fuss and and literally we would have that ready to go in a backpack so that we could convey the sense of immediacy in the hunting scenes and literally follow into the woods with without disrupting without pausing for setups or different angles you just want to be able to move so it's an interesting balance between you know what what's your what's your overarching aesthetic going to be and what are the techniques that you can use to achieve that and then nimbleness right right three of you in a minute how are you going to do it yeah and similarly you know you're making a wildlife film at the same time that you you're stitching together human interest stories could you speak to the japanese involvement in the film the people that were yeah that helped you make it yeah i'm proud to say you know predominantly made by japanese folks which is only right and proper you know it is their story lady aiko did the graphics and the key art this is a collage i collected all these stamps and old japanese art and she's built this collage for me but she's actually working on a stencil version right now i love it yeah well yeah i like it it's um it's the kind of the glory days of the atomic age you know where everybody felt so good about about nuclear energy and then to see how that has been polluted and laid low it's kind of interesting lady aiko she went into fukushima a couple of months after the disaster and tagged the whole place maturi takada is an amazing japanese ambient artist she did that kind of dysphonic jarring unnerving soundtrack she composed and recorded that to picture for me which was a great honor she hasn't done a lot of recording um in several years and she saw the film and and and was kind enough to to compose a whole new body of work exactly matched to the film you approached her well it's an interesting story dory decada she released this incredible album seminal japanese ambient music album in i think 1984 was called through the looking glass and i've always loved it i actually tried to buy on vinyl about five years ago and it was like a thousand dollars right on disc cox or something i couldn't couldn't spring for that but then it turned out that um there was uh a label an executive from a label who was listening to i think jean-michel jar or something and the youtube algorithm took him to this very rare recording i think she only made like 500 copies of the album and it was somebody had posted on youtube and this executive heard it and re-released the album a couple of years ago and it sold like 250 000 copies came really big so i i had initially i'd wanted to set the film because the album's about 40 minutes long sort of matches up with my runtime right and i sort of wanted to set the film to that album through the looking glass um so i approached midori sun and um you know we went for uh lunch in tokyo and she met my family and had a nice chat about things and then she saw the film and she um she wrote to me and said i'm not gonna you know we're not gonna use through the looking glass i'm gonna compose something entirely original for you and it's beautiful because it is jarring it is dysphonic it does keep you on edge and it doesn't let you relax which is exactly what i wanted to encoura you know that was the ambience i was going for and um she she nailed it so you know there's a there's lovely moments where like the a pig will sniff the air and she puts in a little whimsical note there and it's just yeah it's just lovely held it how well she matched it up yeah foreign are you the most appropriate person to be telling the story i'm a white guy from england so i've been thinking about this a lot recently like is it appropriate that i go to japan and tell a story there typically honestly no probably not one glimmer of vindication there though is that the response that i got from the people that i spoke to and interviewed when we were there people were ready to unload they they wanted to talk about their experiences they wanted to talk about the sacrifices that they continue to make i mean there are story lines which i couldn't find a place for in the film which are equally as heart-wrenching that one of the other hunters who we followed shijiro-san you know he carried his disabled 40 year old child on his back [Music] you know through the encroaching tsunami to to safety you know the the kids who who fled the shoreline to get to the mountains i mean there's a feeling that they have been forgotten or shunned there's a lot of people uh across japan who who who make fun of the people from fukushima you know don't marry a girl from fukushima these were the the sort of the the things that we heard from them so they were primed they were ready to ready to share their their stories what kind of testing is involved after a day of filming in the restricted radioactive area you you pull your minibus up into a lay-by they scan your shoes scan the tires take back to osometers that they've given you at the start of the day and there's some some form filling and then you're on your way what kind of ppe was required for this film because the subjects of your documentary aren't wearing anything were you guys like how did you protect yourselves so we started out with the best of intentions you know hazmat suits we all wore uh geiger counters throughout the filming we quickly gave up on the hazmat suits because you just get into the way of filming and you you sort of forgo much of that i'm sorry to say but the the dosometers the geiger counters we kept those with us and it was always interesting to see you know you move from an area which has been decontaminated it's been scrubbed a road or a path or something like that you step into the bush and then the numbers just explode on you and and this is kind of one of the key issues with that whole decontamination um strategy but where do they put it they dump it and then they they or it's about like what they're going to do with it is still open to question it's still undecided the holding areas around the reactor where they're keeping these millions of bags you know they've they've sort of got a 30-year outlook on that they're also using some of it to to build a motorway bypass you know the bed of a motorway bypass sadly and symbolically i think just so people can kind of skirt past this polluted region what kind of impact are you hoping this documentary has i really hope the film resurfaces attention on on fukushima you know 311 it's the uh it's the 10th anniversary in 2021 of the fukushima disaster and you know the government i think is still planning to go ahead with the olympics planning on hosting baseball matches and softball matches in fukushima and um i want to make sure that the people i met and spoke to that their stories are heard at least at the same time as that sort of blitz of positivity occurs i want to make sure that they get fair audience and that um you know their sacrifices aren't brushed under the carpet they feel that time has moved on and they've been somewhat forgotten and you know the subsidies have ended for them so uh you know if you initially refugees their rent and accommodation was paid for as they had to flee the area now that these areas have been reopened even though contamination levels are worryingly high their subsidies are finished so they're sort of in a bind as to what to do not just in america but globally so many people are questioning their governments or there's like a lack of accountability with the government yeah and you know how does that apply to the japanese situation yeah there are there are really unnerving parallels which i could not have imagined noticing six months ago and the government explained that as over testing it sound familiar yeah yeah right now it's not just the isolated empty streets it's the way in which um people's lives can be pushed aside and subjugated in service of some greater ordained narrative i mean it's it's gross it's fundamentally wrong you know i asked you earlier in the very blunt way like were you the right guy to make this movie white guy going in and after sitting and talking and i didn't mean that no negative no i mean it's on my mind too but but at the same time i think it's important to realize like if not you then who who else was trying to make this movie and who and you did it in a very very respectful way and got them involved so thank you i'm i'm grateful that i made this film i set out to make a quite an impressionistic film here that perhaps maybe raises more questions than it answers right it's deliberately threadbare on exposition you know there's those three cards at the front to tell you there was there was an earthquake there was a tsunami there was a nuclear meltdown and and that's all you're getting and here it is eight years later so it it comes from there's a there's a director i really respect she um she recently she told me that you know there's two kinds of documentaries basically there's a documentary which tells you what to think and then there's a documentary which tells you what to think about and i deliberately wanted to create a film that was impressionistic perhaps almost even irritating in its lack of exposition and conclusions um so that you left you left the cinema fired up so that he left the viewing wanting to know more wanting to get answers to your questions also i don't think i have the right to go in there and tell people how to think about the situation i deliberately wanted to create a space where people of fukushima come forward provide their testimony talk about the sacrifices that they continue to make and then leave you to take from that what you will [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 844,983

Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, vice news 2020, the toxic pigs of fukushima, suroosh alvi, The Short List, Toxic Pigs, Fukushima, Fukushima nuclear meltdown, toxic landscape, international news, Great East Japan Earthquake, Fukushima Prefecture, The Toxic Pigs of Fukushima, radiated Wild Boars, Yuki Iwanami

Id: sbjwPMfIn_Q

Length: 66min 12sec (3972 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Sirguido7]

That close with a scope is comical

[u/TheCatbus_stops_here]

Cody is always right about boars.

[u/Dagigai]

Not available in my country? (England)

[u/TheBiggestDangus]

Irradiated.

[u/Streacher]

Thank you for not making this video available in my country

[u/Azer_already_ff]

Radboars...

[u/[deleted]]

Where are all my "how you get orcs" comments at?

[u/M54b25simp]

14 day period cycle and no dreams... fucking no thank you

[u/moonkey2]

A good of use for that one American dude's assault riffle