Ana Vaz’s second feature film, Hanabi (2026), which she describes as a “savage adaptation” of Yoko Hayasuke’s “Journal of a Radioactive Brain,” journeys across the human and more-than-human afterlives of the Fukushima disaster. Carried by a disembodied, haunting voiceover in the second person that builds on Yoko’s reflections, the film traces her real and imagined footsteps, fūkeiron-style, through the socially structured – and often contaminated – spaces we now traverse and inhabit. Conceived as part of a wider “tentacular” project, Hanabi was filmed over the space of a decade in Japan and incorporates footage from Vaz’s earlier works, repurposing them into a new constellation of voices, gestures, and landscapes. At once intimate and planetary in scope, the film probes the quotidian reverberations of nuclear catastrophe and the porous entanglements of bodies and environments, drawing the viewer into a world where horror and regeneration disturbingly coexist. Tiago de Luca met with Vaz for e-flux Film Notes to discuss Hanabi, her recent experiments with cameraless filmmaking, the limits of cinematic categories, and the imperative to confront “the monstrous” in our age of ecological derangement.
Tiago de Luca: You describe your new film Hanabi (2026) as a “savage adaptation” of Yoko Hayasuke’s essay “Journal of a Radioactive Brain.” But the film also brings together footage from other works you have made over the last decade, including Atomic Garden (2018), Amazing Fantasy (2018), and the installation The Voyage Out: Embrace Tiger Return to Mountain (2022).1 How did these different strands come together in Hanabi?
Ana Vaz: In order to dig into the thresholds and depths of Hanabi, we have to delve into a time scope that exceeds what is normally conceived as the duration of a film production. Hanabi is a work that challenges the way in which cinema is usually produced, and the idea of “production” itself. The problem is that production in cinema is thought of in terms of a linear, product-driven kind of impetus, so that time can be treated in the most “efficient” way possible. Together with my early collaborators on the film (producer Olivier Marboeuf and sound artist Nuno da Luz), we were trying to think beyond this Fordist production model. Hence, extending the temporality of its making, while also decentering the figure of the author-filmmaker, so that the film would be made by an assembly of artists, authors, thinkers, and communities. This extended timeline would allow for the film to evolve and emerge from these collaborations and relationships sewn over time. 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.
So, very early on, I thought of this film as an archipelago—not only as a conceptual metaphor, but as an embodiment of the composite process of making it. There was a moment when I dreamt that Hanabi would be a film made of parts, a tentacular film that would be released at the same time in many different places of the world. People would see different versions of it, but never its entirety. This was our utopia, and in many ways this is also reflected in the different gestures that compose this body of work, such as the shorter films, installations, performances, and readings.
TdL: How important for you was it to release Hanabi as a feature-length film, your second after It’s Night in America (É noite na América, 2022)?
AV: The categories of the film industry interest me very little. I'm not interested in the feature or in the short—works last what they need to last. It’s Night in America was made in the spirit of a short film, with very modest means and no initial intention of becoming a feature. At first, I didn't know if Hanabi would be a single feature film. I knew that it would be an experience made of moments of proximity and distance with this territory that we were very slowly trying to listen to, to attune to, while honoring certain friendships that we were making along the way. Hanabi is not the final result of this archipelago of gestures. It’s just one of its islands, territories, volcanoes. It doesn’t efface or replace the previous works; it’s just one more possible version of the same material. Versions allow for narratives to be living organisms, rather than fixed epitaphs.
TdL: Your body of work is very flexible and anti-dogmatic, open to an array of techniques, devices, forms and formats…
AV: I’ve never been fond of dogmas, and for me a given situation, a territory, an encounter, is what will always direct form, technique, or device. I rarely begin a film with a form that is already fully established a priori, because this often asphyxiates the possibility of listening to what a place or a situation is telling you. So, I'm much more interested in attuning to places and situations in order to find the best possible conditions for us to listen to and to improvise around certain situations. That’s what I most love about what I do: being open to what will inevitably come, rather than submitting a situation into a form. Take It’s Night in America, a film made with a great sense of urgency, without a script, without any security that we would be producing images at all—we were using expired stock—and without a clear idea of where the film was taking us. We were following an intuition and the encounters that ensued. By contrast, Hanabi was made over 10 years. The film begged us to be patient, to return to places, to think over everything we had assumed. Form and technique can only be the aftermath of experience.
TdL: But having this component of the project as a feature-length film allows it to be showcased at venues that it wouldn’t otherwise, for instance, the competition lineup of a film festival. In this sense, the feature format does open up other avenues for your work?
AV: I still believe that film theaters are spaces in which there’s more debate than the art gallery or the museum. I believe in the experience and the pact of the film theater as a somewhat more democratic space. It is not about festivals per se, but about the long life of films as objects and experiences that can open and incite debate and conversation. In the case of Hanabi, I also felt compelled to work with an editor, who was not implicated in the film from the beginning. I collaborated with a wonderful Lebanese filmmaker and editor, Chaghig Arzoumanian, who was really able to push the materials into a narrative form that in my view is both cinematic and literary. The film plays with traditions ranging from diaristic cinema to direct cinema, but it also has elements of thriller, narrative cinema, and the political essay. In this sense, Chaghig’s experience as a fiction filmmaker, documentarian, and editor contributed greatly to the film. I think Hanabi is trying to push the boundaries not only of perception, of hearing, of sensing, but also of how we can tell a story. Taking time as its central subject, fragmentation becomes at once a metaphor and a possible translation of our experience of moving images in a world saturated by images—how to relate, apprehend, and digest the images that we receive.
TdL: The film proposes this very interesting confluence of divergent temporalities. On the one hand, you have the deep time of geological and radioactive processes and on the other the diary-like format, which reflects a humanocentric way of marking time.
AV: Yoko Hayasuke’s journal is stitched together from daily entries marked by day but never by year. We don’t know in which year the events take place or how much time elapses. She once told me that time has passed in the shape of a spiral since the accident. We see recurring images of disjointed places drawn together by time markers and timekeepers: the rings of an ancient tree, the crushed calendars and clocks on the women’s collective farm, the clandestine footage paced by a clock, days passing, a sun setting, a moon rising. The whole film is structured around time and its slippages from linearity. There is no clear timeline, and motifs repeat and re-emerge. Throughout her journals, she also questions her own humanity in its obligation of allegiance to the nation-state, the self, the “I.” Time and the self are in constant struggle to conceive of themselves. There is something disarming in the way Yoko writes her diaries in the second person: “you.”
TdL: I was going to ask whether the second-person voiceover narration in the film was a creative decision, but it looks like you were actually being quite faithful to the journal then?
AV: Totally faithful because for me the brilliance and the political significance of her writing, especially as it is translated into Western languages like French and English, is that the “I”—the usual mode of address of the diary form—becomes a “you.” Hence, we begin reconsidering the “I.” You are reading (or listening to) someone who’s addressing herself as if that self could also be yourself. And this, for me, is the incredible proposal of Yoko’s diaries, because in her reflections about the body, the nation state, the violence of borders, the violence of bodily borders, of patriarchy, of gaslighting, all of that she’s doing in a way in which she’s also inviting you in by using the “you.” This is unsettling because it goes against the tradition of more conventional documentary filmmaking and diaristic forms in which we can remain as a passive observer of the drama. In Hanabi, and in Yoko’s journal, you cannot stay outside as a passive observer. The film and her writings are inviting you as a viewer, as a listener, as a body, to participate, to reflect on and to engage with what’s actually being displayed.
TdL: At the film’s start, the voiceover recounts the earthquake that set in motion the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The idea of the earth as something endowed with its own volition is a recurring theme in your work, and recently you have also ventured into the realm of cameraless films, where the agency of the earth is present but in a different way. Can you talk a little about that?
AV: I think that all of the films I’ve made so far are visceral attempts at going underneath the surface, underneath what’s apparent. I’ve often used the term “excavation” to speak about the ways in which these works delve into what was rendered invisible, invisibilized, buried, silenced, forcefully forgotten. The film you mention, Pax Tellurica (2026), a wonderful title which I owe to Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto and to the Cia Teatral Ueinzz, is part of a larger body of work. During a seminar held virtually in Brazil with Juliana Fausto, Valentina Tong, and myself, Juliana ended our conversation with a wonderful challenge. She said that with Ueinzz, they were collectively questioning the constructions of Empire-founded Pax Romana and the Pax Americana and trying to conceive of what would be a Pax Tellurica, hence of the Earth, of the soil. At that moment, I don’t think my answer was able to articulate much with words. Years later, after seeing the first imprints of earth directly etched on film, I felt I could finally begin to answer. Pax Tellurica (2026) is a cameraless film made from the contact of unexposed black and white film buried—and hence exposed—to an Amazonian archeological compost called terra preta de Índio (Amazonian black earth). Terra preta has been studied since the late 19th century by archeologists and biologists searching for traces and remnants of pre-Columbian societies in the Amazon forest. The studies around terra preta contradict the colonial narrative that envisions the forest as a so-called “natural oasis,” showing that the forest is standing due to the enduring work of autochthonous societies that have inhabited these lands for over 10,000 years. I was very interested—again, thinking about temporality and alternate timescales—to go against the settler’s clock and to conceive of imaginaries, past and future, of pre-Columbian time.
For years, I have been speaking with archaeologists, anthropologists, and soil analysts about terra preta and the way in which it reveals an enduring resistance to the formation of any kind of Empire in that region. So, I came to think that as a gesture of resistance to language or description: the only way to begin this film would be to move away from the camera as an apparatus of mediation, capture, and taxonomy and to work with film directly in contact with the soil.
TdL: Your work is sometimes classed under the rubric of “landscape cinema,” which has been around for a while but gained particular prominence over the past 20 years because of the ecological crisis. I wonder whether you’re comfortable with this category. I have my own reservations because I think it often fails to capture what these films are doing and reinforces this idea of landscape as a distant, framed nature for a human spectator. I find that your work often seeks to abolish that distance.
AV: To be very honest, I'm like to hell with categories (laughs). “Landscape cinema” sounds like we are speaking of a cinema made by Romantic painters of the 18th century. I’m also suspicious of the way that, within the economy around our attention, labels precede experience. Hence, people seem to become incapable of really looking at works, at taking time to spend with a strange object, of appreciating strangeness. So I am normally very suspicious of this necessity to label anything, increasingly so, as it seems to be marketing more than anything. For me, it’s just cinema.
TdL: But in Hanabi you seem to draw on the Japanese fūkeiron (landscape theory), tracing Yoko Hayasuke’s footsteps in a way that recalls Masao Adachi’s AKA Serial Killer (1975)?
AV: That’s a different story. AKA Serial Killer goes against a romantic landscape theory. It deals with territory. And I think that’s the distinction that I wanted to make. Territory is a web of relationships, a place of inhabitation, of living, of beings. Landscape seems to presuppose an empty space, a tabula rasa, a “natural” space, as if such a thing existed. Within landscape, there’s always an idea that there’s a passive contemplation of something that you’re seeing out there. With the entangled and complex idea of the territory, you’re really taking seriously the forces at play: they are historical, they’re spectral, they are sonic, they are political, and they shape a territory. And I think that is the brilliance of Masao Adachi’s work, particularly AKA Serial Killer. It removes the main character so as to show the actual material conditions that make a subject, not the reverse. But I think I only deeply understood AKA Serial Killer when I began working with Yoko Hayasuke on Hanabi. When I first met her in Tokyo back in 2018, and we were talking about literature and the political weight of her text, she then turned to me and said: “Ana, I cannot be in your film and my writing cannot be featured in Japanese.” So, in political allegiance to her right to opacity, she extracts herself from the film and requests “please don’t personify me.” Hence, the subject is no longer a single “I,” nor a single “you”—it becomes perhaps a “we,” and also a place. With her absence from the film, I became increasingly interested in filming the places she describes as quotidian: everyday life in Tokyo, which wasn’t a character in the film before. Also, by refusing to use Japanese language for her writing, her text seems to enter into friction with these places, inscribing another layer of complexity into the film.
TdL: 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: In the very early moments of film history, we often see images of bodies moving—humans, horses, cats, dogs, insects, etc. Often we think of these images as purely scientific, as if their intent was simply that of rendering movement perceptible, submitted to the lens. For me, these images also have a metaphysical dimension that remains latent in the image. Epicurus and Lucretius, as early scientists, already wrote and conceived of the body as a porous entity. It is rather the idea of the body as an enclosed, self-contained unit that seems to be a heresy. Yoko herself speaks about this in a wonderful entry from her diary dating from March 20, in which she speculated about this borderless body as an erotic body, “open towards the outside and constantly transformed.” She continues, “when we kiss, when we whisper in each other’s ears, when we hold hands, our bodies become excited and transform themselves,” and concludes with a vertiginous passage: “the very condition of eroticism is the vulnerability of the body subject to illness and destined for death.”
This confrontation with mortality, with the finite within the infinite, goes against the perpetual insistence on eternity and the deep fear of the vulnerability of our existences. I am very fond of the Gothic tradition in the ways it confronts the thresholds, the darkness, grief, and the monstrous. Gothic literature emerges as a reaction against the dominance of Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, order, and its implicit endowment to the colonial enterprise. For me, this is how Hanabi becomes an important political manifesto for the time we’re living in. 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. We have no space to grieve everything that is currently dying and being extinguished at such an alarming rate. It’s vertiginous. I feel that Yoko’s text and the film are trying to insist on the importance of holding that space, of letting that space exist, because I don’t think we can affirm any form of transformation if we don’t also hold this space of grieving, which is also one of becoming.
The installation was presented in “Shéhérazade, la nuit” at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2022.
