Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard

Date and Time

September 21, 2015
12:15PM - 02:30PM EDT

Location

Wasserstein Hall, Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Avenue, Milstein East A

"Meanwhile in Japan—Filming in the Nuclear Exclusion Zone"

Speaker:

Thorsten Trimpop, Fellow, MIT Open Documentary Lab.

Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Wednesday of the week before the event.

Contact:

Shana Rabinowich
shana_rabinowich@hks.harvard.edu

Abstract:

my old home
now a deserted ruin –
the sadness of a town
where Cesium rains down without a sound

Keiko Hangui (Fukushima, November 2011)

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, precipitated by the March 2011 tsunami, is among the worst environmental catastrophes in human history. It is an ongoing cataclysm, but no film to date has captured the long-term consequences for the people who live in the shadow of the power plant. What does it mean to live with an invisible constant threat? Furusato: The Way Home goes inside a community shattered by the catastrophe. Filmed in Minamisoma, a provincial town in the exclusion zone, over the course of four years, it features a teen rocker, a media-savvy activist, a deeply conflicted nuclear engineer, and a samurai horse breeder.Furusato is a singular and often surreal portrait of a small town‘s search for normalcy. In this lecture I will show some exclusive excerpts and talk about the particular challenges of filming under these conditions.

Biography:

Thorsten Trimpop is a German filmmaker currently based in Cambridge, MA. He is in final post production of his new film, Furusato: The Way Home, a human-scale portrait of a small town in Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone. His first feature film, The Irrational Remains, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and won numerous awards. His earlier film and theater work have been presented at venues such as the Locarno Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Currently he teaches filmmaking and film studies at Massachusetts College of Art and Boston University. He is also a fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab where he is working on a new project. 

Chair:

Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.

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