About

Sion Sono's The Land of Hope was the first feature film to fulsomely engage with the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. The notorious cult auteur delivers a surprisingly heartfelt and passionate portrayal of two families whose lives are permanently changed after a nuclear meltdown caused by an earthquake besets their town in the invented prefecture of Nagashima - a not-so-subtle portmanteau of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The diverging paths of the members of both families offers a view of the spectrum of personal responses to a disaster of such a scale, and provides a fascinating insight into Sono's views on the societal reaction to the real Fukushima crisis. Like Shin Godzilla 2016, the film sharply critiques the government's handling of the disaster and the banal cruelty of unsympathetic bureaucracy. Yet, critically, and without overblown mawkishness, Sono offers a message of resilience and qualified hope in the face of seemingly insurmountable circumstances through the personal journeys of his thoughtfully-crafted characters.

Ages 15+