Haruka Komori

Documentary about Sato Teiichi's daily life spent doing everything by hand at his seed shop in Rikuzentakada City, which was devastated by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Filmmaker Komori Haruka handles directing, camera and editing in her feature film directorial debut. Sato's home-cum-shop were swept away by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. He runs the Sato Seed Shop where he makes everything on his own, including the construction of the prefab building, digging of the well, and creation of the signage, and he also writes a diary using self-taught English about his experiences during the disaster.

The work is constituted from video footage of scenery and encounters with locals in the coastal city of Rikuzentakata, which was devastated by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The artists spent three years and eight months documenting the region, subsequently constructing their footage to create a narrative.

Based on the play "Our Town" (written by Thornton Wilder), the daily life of a girl living in a rural town and the members of the theater company who are practicing the stage of Act 3 of "Our Town" are drawn alternately. Is done. The drama's words about the world in which the dead live overlap with the everyday life of a rural town and are projected onto the actors themselves. It is a work completed in the process with the actors.

After the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011, Komori Haruka and Seo Natsumi chose to live and film in Rikuzentakata. This work is a visual record of four people who applied for a workshop Komori and Seo devised, showing them visiting the town and getting to know its people and landscape. The opportunity to hear personal experiences of the disaster decreases with time, but this film provides a bridge to new encounters and communication, in addition to including a story written by Seo entitled “Double Layered Town.”

The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami destroyed large parts of the small town of Rikuzentakata. Here, Hiromi ABE hosts a radio show in which she reports on local events and interviews the residents. She focuses not only on the time after the disaster and the ongoing rebuilding of the community, but also on recording personal stories.

Shimokajiro Housing Complex is a public reconstruction housing complex for people evacuated from Namie, Futaba, Okuma, and Tomioka, as a result of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In this housing complex, where people gather from different places and where many elderly dwell, they began making and distributing CDs on music they remember, also putting on a show as if they were running a radio program, and even forming a band to play along with the rhythm of each singer. This film is a record of these unusual support activities for the disaster-stricken areas, connected by music to transcend the times and the COVID-19 pandemic.