Voices in the Wind Voices in the Wind

Haru is a 17-year-old girl living with the aching loss of her brother and parents being swept away by a tsunami during the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11th, 2011. She has been living with her aunt in Hiroshima for the past eight years, but when her aunt suddenly falls sick, Haru is once again on a long journey back home to Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture. Director SUWA Nobuhiro, an Okinawan native, has published works that reflect on the city’s devastating memories of the atomic bombing, including A Letter from Hiroshima (2000) and H Story (2001), the latter of which is a modern adaptation of Hiroshima Mon Amour by Alain Resnais. While his past films focus on the Hiroshima disaster, the director turns his attention to what is called the 3.11 disaster in his latest work, Voices in the Wind. Never truer than now is his quote that, “a film serves not to portray the event itself, but to record what else is happening around that very event,” given that fragments of the past have not just slipped away and been put to rest, but are still impacting our present to this very day. (LEE Jong-chan)