This week, Film Notes publishes a conversation between Ana Vaz and Tiago de Luca on Hanabi (2026), which draws on Yoko Hayasuke’s “Journal of a Radioactive Brain” to confront the aftermath of Fukushima. Vaz describes how the film grew through a decade of collaboration. Her recent experiments with cameraless filmmaking extend the discussion to cinema’s contact with the earth and the vulnerability of bodies.
Selected excerpts from the conversation:
Ana Vaz: I was interested in making a film in parts, in segments that could slowly build a body. I am drawn to the incomplete, the partial, the imperfect, the drafts. I’m less interested in cinema as a professional tool to assert mastery, heroism, linearity, or climax, and much more interested in its capacity to elicit reflection, insurgency, and trouble in its capacity to affect us.
Also, from the beginning, I knew that the film would be addressing questions that had to do with time: a time that exceeds our own existence, be it the perpetual endurance of radioactive contamination, or the geological time of the birth of this new island, Nishinoshima, that emerged a few years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
All of that seemed to be relevant in order to think about the entanglements between the human and other-than-human worlds, extending the disaster and its consequences to bodies of land, water, air, earth, and flesh.
[…]
Tiago de Luca: Hanabi also made me think of Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “transcorporeality,” which challenges the idea that humans and the environment are separate entities. Radioactive energy makes clear just how porous this boundary is. Could you talk a little about this, and how it relates to your broader interest in what cinema can make visible, including things that are not directly visible?
AV: […] Our intent is precisely to confront the abject, the monstrous, and the disaster, not as something outside of you, but as something inside you too. The disaster is in us; the disaster is also us. And that’s where the transcorporeal for me makes sense, as a means to cease the great separation between us and the world. And for this we also need to nurture and to hold space for grieving, loss, and mourning.
