A DANCE FOR BLUE WHALES

Two Young Fukushima Survivors Trace Memories in the Sand

Venue(s): Eurospace
Sept. 19 - 25, 2015: 21:10; Sept. 26 - Oct. 09, 2015: 21:10 on Thursday and Friday
Language: Japanese with English subtitles (Silent film)
Official website: www.kujirafilm.com/
Trailer: https://youtu.be/v-_y-nrhLZE
Tariff: General: ￥1,800, Student: ￥1,400, Senior: ￥1,200, H.S. Student: ￥800, Junior High Student and under: ￥500
Advance tickets: ¥1,500
Talk event: TBA

Title: シロナガスクジラに捧げるバレエ (Shironagasu Kujira ni Sasageru Balley)
Director: Katsumi Sakaguchi (坂口香津美)
Duration: 72 mins

Tokyo Filmgoer readers will be familiar with director Katsumi Sakaguchi’s earlier 2015 release, the heartbreaking-but-hopeful box-office juggernaut Walking With My Mother. In that film, an unflinching portrait of Sakaguchi’s aging mother as she recovered from personal loss and an uncaring medical industry, the dialogue is nearly constant.

In Sakaguchi’s new film, also a heartbreaking-but-hopeful story, there is almost no dialogue at all.

Dance for Blue Whales is a purely visual, elliptically poetic response to the 3.11 Tohoku disaster, following two young sisters who have lost everything in the tsunami as they journey back to their seaside village to search for some trace of their family and home. Blue whales once graced the waters nearby, and the sisters decide they must stay on, to rebuild. But exhaustion and hunger soon set in, and the girls lapse into a dream of the past. Their lost family seems to join them, helping to gather wood for a new home, dancing and making merry. But the reverie gradually dissipates…

The film features original piano music by Takashi Niigaki, the composer who recently unveiled a decades-long hoax by confessing to being the ghostwriter for “deaf”-and-blind musician Mamoru Samuragochi, once considered the Beethoven of Japan.