Tag: disaster

Aniara

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

An elevator to the stratosphere winches passengers up from Earth to the docked spaceship Aniara. The interplanetary passenger liner is effectively a gigantic shuttle taking people to Mars to begin a new life. As the journey can be mentally traumatic, Aniara has an on board facility called Mima, a room / interface into which users plug themselves to relive old memories. Both interface and its human client group are looked after by a facilitator called the Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson). The clients lie down with their heads resting on something that looks like a neck brace and experience, say, a forest in Spring with a fresh brook running through it, “the Earth as it used to be”.

Early in the journey to Mars, Aniara hits space’s equivalent of an air pocket: the ship tilts and, for a short time, everything on board is total chaos. Then things return to normal. Only, they don’t.

Eventually, the captain announces over the ship’s large screen video, public address system that Aniara swerved to avoid a fatal collision with an asteroid. The passengers and crew are very lucky to be still alive. The manoeuvre also involved jettisoning all the ship’s fuel. Now Aniara is drifting having been knocked off course – not a problem since once it approaches a nearby planet or other celestial body, the crew can use the planet’s gravitational field to slingshot themselves back on course. However as the Mimaroben’s world-weary, astronomer room mate (Anneli Martini) points out to her, the ship isn’t going anywhere near any such planets or bodies. So they’re just drifting through space with little likelihood of either reaching Mars or being rescued.

What follows, unusually and refreshingly for an sci-fi film ostensibly about space travel, is a study of a self-enclosed society in crisis as it moves from a consumerist passenger liner model to something much more prescriptive and co-operative. Food production shifts to algae-based crops which may provide a less pleasant diet but nevertheless ensures all the ship’s the population are adequately and healthily fed.

As more and more people want to use Mima as a form of temporary respite from the ship’s seemingly hopeless predicament, the facility eventually reaches a point where it can no longer cope with the client numbers and breaks under the strain. Accused of shutting down the now inoperable system, the Mimaroben is moved to more menial tasks.

Despite her initiating the occasional unsatisfactory sexual encounter with a male pickup, the Mimaroben’s main romantic interest is to be found in a pilot named Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro) with whom she eventually moves in and forms a household. This works for the two of them, at least for a while, but elsewhere on the ship the social tension becomes more and more strained. Fundamentalist quasi-religious cults arise, their dubious practices involving gathering for mass orgiastic rituals, partly for the purposes of procreation. Meanwhile, the marginalised Mimaroben may have a long term solution to all the unrest: she harbours a dream of building a VR display of sorts outside the ship to show images to the population in order to help them cope with their situation.

It’s never discussed exactly what has befallen planet Earth, but images of conflagration jostle with Mima’s ‘past’ imagery of healthy woodlands and fresh running water suggesting global warming has taken its toll. Crew notwithstanding, the implication is that everyone on the ship possesses sufficient financial resources to buy their way out. When disaster occurs, their bubble of self-preservation is burst and they enter into a sort of social free-fall where anything goes. Perhaps the piece overreaches itself a little with its religious orgies which play out as compelling spectacle even as you half wonder exactly what they’re doing in the narrative. Otherwise, though, it’s impressive as a piece of sci-fi, refreshingly intelligent as a portrait of a society in crisis. Overall, it’s wholly fascinating.

Aniara is out in the UK on Friday, August 30th. On VoD in March. Watch the film trailer below:

Intention (Geunal, Bada)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In 2014, Korea’s Sewol ferry capsized with considerable loss of life, some 304 people, many of those killed being schoolchildren. The families of those involved didn’t believe they were being told the whole truth. As with Yongsan and British disasters like Grenfell and Hillsborough, there was a feeling that the authorities were not interested in transparency and bringing those responsible to account. Instead, it seemed they wanted to cover up what happened, hoping allegations of wrongdoing would go away.

The situation in Korea in 2014 was exacerbated by a right wing administration that believed it could get away with falsifying evidence. The then President Park Gyun-hye was subsequently impeached for corruption in 2017, forcing a new election and a new, less right wing government within months.

Yet in the wake of the Sewol disaster, internet journalist Kim Ou-Joon felt that a documentary feature film could help clarify what actually happened and set the record straight. He turned film producer and raised his budget money via a crowdfunding campaign.

For director’s chair, the producer made the unusual choice of enlisting Kim Ji-young, who had trained as an electrical engineer. This might sound an odd background for a filmmaker, but given this is an investigative journalism type of documentary, it meant he possessed the ability to look at, for example, computer code readouts for the Auto Information System (AIS) that recorded the position of the ship throughout its voyage and see that the official data released by the South Korean government couldn’t possibly be correct, which is to say it had almost certainly been tampered with.

In fact – as he revealed in a fascinating Q&A following the LEAFF 2018 screening – he spent six months learning how to use the AIS programme so he could load data into it and see the results for himself.

Using CG infographics, Kim Ji-young shows us the ship’s route as defined by first the government’s bogus data, then by the Navy’s different data, then the data from the eyewitness accounts of both the Captain of a nearby ship and a number of passengers from the Sewol ferry who actually survived the wreck itself.

With each of the three sets of accounts of the incident, the route of the ship and its position and orientation at points along the way shift until an empirically sound and historically accurate picture is built up.

In addition, towards the end, the director examines and coordinates several cameras’ worth of CCTV footage from the Sewol’s cargo hold to show the audience what happened to a number of the cars and lorries parked below decks when the ship suddenly and rapidly capsized. This is followed by animated simulations if what happened to a number of individual passengers.

There’s no attempt to work out which individuals were directly responsible for the tragedy as at the time of the film’s completion there were a number of different theories but no definitive answer. The producer and filmmaker understandably felt that they wanted to get their film, with its many hitherto unseen findings, out into the public domain to be of nonpartisan use in bringing the responsible parties to justice.

Intention played in the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer below:

Your Name (Kimi no Na wa)

Posted on by mjbstaging

In a spectacular and bravura single take, vertical panning shot, a meteor descends from the heavens through the clouds towards the small lakeside town of Itomori. Then, another time, another place: on a train in Tokyo a teenage girl spots a boy and their eyes meet but there’s no time to exchange names. She knows him but he has no idea who she is. As she gets off the train, he asks her… “Your Name?”

Thereafter, Tokyo boy Taki wakes up some days Mitsuha’s body, and the other way round. Soon, each starts writing the other messages on their hands, arms and mobile phones so that the other one knows what he/she has been up to while they swapped bodies. Until one day, her messages stop.

Like the falling meteor which unexpectedly splits into a shower, at once a beautiful display in the Tokyo night sky and an impending disaster in Itomori, this weaves together two ways of looking. Girl and boy. Countryside and city. Celebration and catastrophe. As a ribbon snakes through space and meteor fragments fall through the atmosphere, a thread weaves through a loom meshing separate timelines. When the two teens meet at the beginning, she is near the end of their encounter while he is at its start thanks to subtle storytelling sleight-of-hand. They may not both know each other yet, but they are connected. When finally they meet again on urban Tokyo hillside steps, the moment is poignant.

Although the meteor is expected to fall in one piece, at the last minute it splits into fragments, one of which will wipe out Itomori. After learning through Taki that this will happen, can Mitsuha and her friends alert the town – busy celebrating its annual festival – to evacuate before lives are lost?

Japanese films have dealt with disaster for a long time, most notably in Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954) which turned the devastation of the A-bomb into the eponymous, city-wasting monster. Recent reboot Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi, 2016) shows the franchise still capable of delivering such myth and metaphor.

Not that Your Name is necessarily about nuclear strikes. Japan has a long history of earthquakes and associated natural disasters, most recently the 2011 tsunami and resultant damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Life goes on but such disastrous events linger in the national psyche and inform popular culture. Even as Your Name absorbs Itomori’s annihilation into its wider culture as a pretty light show over Tokyo, it grapples with the magnitude of the disaster by placing us in the immediate days and hours beforehand.

Elsewhere, Your Name plays out as both teen romance and dual exploration of male/female identity. The two protagonists wake up separately in each other’s bodies to discover with a mixture of delight and embarrassment that they possess the genitals of the opposite sex. As the twin narratives move on to explore more psychological sexual differences, the body swap device proves genuinely affecting. By the time of the impending annihilation of Mitsuko’s home town, you’re completely hooked.

It’s one of those rare movies to watch multiple times. If, like this writer, you saw it last year in a small cinema, to catch the new digital IMAX print on a bigger sized screen is a real treat. While scenes with minimal detail and movement show up the fact, other sequences are all the more effective. This applies not only to the big outdoors vistas where you’d expect it but also more intimate, everyday scenes. In short, compared to much smaller screens, the IMAX format allows Your Name’s visuals the room they need to breathe.

Your Name is out in the UK on Wednesday, August 23rd.

For another animation about Japanese life against the backdrop of impending disaster, click here.