'Hanabi' ('Fire Flower') premieres in Locarno's Concorso Cineasti del Presente section
By Dylan Adamson, Alyssandra Maxine
Ana Vaz Credit: Anthony Francin “When you begin again, you repeat everything,” reflects experimental filmmaker Ana Vaz, thinking of her home country Brazil and the setting of her new feature, “Hanabi,” in Japan. “There’s a normalization of the state of catastrophe and disaster necessary for the system to perpetrate itself. It needs catastrophe in order to exist.”
In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Vaz felt a resonance with the preoccupations with land, people and colonialism that have defined her filmography to this point. “Hanabi,” or “Fire Flower,” weaves in imagery normally associated with healing — farmers, gardens and fireworks — to communicate a profound unease with the silence of present-day Japan.
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