A Decade in Fukushima's Shadow: Ana Vaz's 'Hanabi' Screens at Locarno
Brazilian filmmaker Ana Vaz spent ten years filming in Japan. The result, Hanabi — meaning "Fire Flower" — screens today at the 79th Locarno Film Festival, screening at PalaCinema 3 at 11:00 AM with English subtitles (Locarno Festival programme). At 105 minutes, it is her longest film to date and her second feature, following It's Night in America (2022).
The film loosely adapts Journal of a Radioactive Brain, a book by Yoko Hayasuke that conveys the author's struggle to live in a Japan that denies its permanent irradiation after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident — triggered by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Vaz had already been filming in Japan for two years when she encountered Hayasuke's work in a French essay anthology titled Fukushima et ces Invisibles (Variety).
Hanabi inherits the scrambled structure of Hayasuke's text: diary entries addressed in the second person, assembled non-linearly. The production company Onzer Films calls it a "savage adaptation" (Onzer Films). Shot partly on 16mm, the film captures contaminated grasslands and the sun descending into the sea — a scene philosopher Juliana Fausto, a previous collaborator of Vaz, described as "a wonderful scene to ponder." A voiceover accompanies short interviews with survivors of the Fukushima fallout. Healing imagery threads through the film: farmers, gardens, fireworks.
The film is a France–Brazil co-production from companies tambores, a noite and Les Volcans. Languages are Japanese and English. It screens in the Concorso Cineasti del Presente competition section — a Locarno strand focused on emerging and established auteurs — and is among the films eligible for the Pardo for Change award, which recognises works engaging with environmental and social transformation (Locarno Festival). The 2026 edition of Locarno, running 5–15 August, features 233 films from 69 countries (The Film Stage).
Hanabi also marks two departures for Vaz. It is the first film for which she ceded editing responsibilities, handing the cut to Chaghig Arzoumanian after two years of post-production. And the only intervention Vaz made to the script's content was accidental: while recording narration, she read aloud Hayasuke's line "I would rather be a zombie than a mother" and unconsciously replied, "I would rather be a mother than a zombie." Vaz had just discovered she was pregnant. Arzoumanian insisted the slip stay in the film (Variety).
Vaz is described by the Locarno Festival as an artist and filmmaker whose works are film-poems. Her previous films and installations include It Is Night in America, Apiyemiyekî? and The Voyage… — a body of work that has moved steadily from short-form experimentation toward the longer, more layered architecture of Hanabi.
