Members present "Fukushima, mon Amour"

This film – Doris Dörrie’s third shot on location in Japan – portrays the encounter of two women who could not be more different: A young German woman going through a crisis who decides to go to Japan to help survivors of the natural and nuclear disasters of Fukushima, and an old Japanese woman, Fukushima’s last geisha, who moves back to her home in what has become a restricted area. Both are confronted with the ghosts of their pasts. Doris Dörrie succeeds once again in this film to make the invisible visible and heaviness light. Set in black-and-white images in an obliterated landscape, the film tells a universal, poetic story about life and letting go. It deals with notions of homeland and loss, and ultimately with the question of whether we help others so that we may in fact feel better ourselves.

The film was awarded the Heiner-Carow-Preis and the CICAE Art Cinema Award at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale).

Doris Dörrie is a director, scriptwriter, professor, opera director, author, and a member of the Akademie der Künste.

Written and directed by Doris Dörrie
Director of Photography: Hanno Lentz
Editor: Frank Müller
Music: Ulrike Haage
Cast: Rosalie Thomass, Kaori Momoi, Moshe Cohen, Nami Kamata u.a.
D 2016, 104 min