Film Screening: My Atomic Aunt

13/14 Cornwall Terrace (Outer Circle), London NW1 4QP

Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation

Once avid supporters of the local nuclear plant and its managers, Aunt Kuniko and her community are on the verge of being permanently excluded from their homes in the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe.

Director Kyoko Miyake, having lived outside of Japan for more than a decade, feels compelled to revisit Fukushima. She wants to find out the fate of her family’s home-town Namie, which with its golden beaches and friendly neighbours used to be her childhood idyll.

Today, Namie is a shadow of its former self having been completely destroyed by the tsunami and, because of the threat of radiation from the nearby power plant, might never be rebuilt.

Following her aunt Kuniko, Miyake begins to question her nostalgic childhood memories and in so doing understand the harsh economic realities and sacrifices that her Aunt and the people of Namie had to make in order to survive.

Why aren’t the people who have ‘sacrificed’ and been through so much angrier at the officials? Are the western media right in depicting Japanese as being too obedient, or is there another explanation? The film unearths uncomfortable revelations from the past that prevents things from being so clear-cut. At the same time, aunt Kuniko slowly begins to change her attitude towards the state and its system – never losing her optimism and her positive outlook for long, but instead gaining a healthy scepticism for everything she’s being told.

About the contributors

Kyoko Miyake

Kyoko Miyake’s first feature-length documentary, My Atomic Aunt (aka Beyond the Wave /Meine Tante aus Fukushima) was supported by 7 broadcasters and numerous grants including BBC, NHK, WDR and Sundance and has been screened and broadcasted in many countries. Her second film, Brakeless, is a co-production with BBC Storyville, ITVS, NHK, IKON and DR, and premiered at the Sheffield Doc Festival in June 2014. Miyake originally came to the UK to study the history of English witchcraft at Oxford University as a Swire Centenary Scholar, having studied English history at Tokyo University. While studying and working for various British and Japanese media organisations, she picked up a camera to fulfil her childhood dream of becoming a filmmaker and started to make short films on her own. She still intends to use her academic background to make films about witchcraft.