(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The Day the Sun Fell
Director: Aya Domenig
The personal documentary is almost a genre of documentary film. This year's documentary film festival in Thessaloniki showed several such films, including Dutch Tom Fassaerts A Family Affair. This film, which also had the honor of being an opening film at the Amsterdam Documentary Festival a few months earlier, portrays the director's attempt to understand and get to know his grandmother, a former model who decades ago left her two small sons and settled in the South -Africa. A Family Affair is a fascinating portrait of a self-staging and sometimes very manipulative human being you rarely know where you are, and a movie that takes several unexpected turns. Not least when the protagonist tells the filmmaker, who is her own granddaughter, that she is in love with him.
In the seven years the country was under American occupation after the war, it was forbidden to talk in detail about the nuclear bomb and its damage effects.
In the best families. A Family Affair is an example of a personal documentary whose strength lies precisely in the personal, where, based on his family, one tells an interpersonal and partly psychologically based story. The fact that Fassaert's family history is obviously special does not prevent many from being engaged by it, and even recognize themselves and theirs. Rather, on the contrary, I would say. Because we have known all of us – even in the seemingly best-functioning families.
The Day the Sun Fell, which also appeared in Thessaloniki, is also a personal documentary – again with a filmmaker seeking out his grandmother. At the same time, it is a film that demonstrates how the personal documentary can also point far beyond personal family matters, to very significant historical and political events.
Grandfather's story. The film's Japanese-Swiss director Aya Domenig lives in Switzerland but has a family from Hiroshima. Here, her grandfather worked as a young physician during the war, and on the morning of Monday, August 6, 1945, when the Americans dropped the "Little Boy" nuclear bomb, he went to work from the more rural house he was commuting for a week. Only ten days later did he return to Domenig's grandmother, without talking about what he had experienced.
Some years later he died of cancer, hardly unrelated to the radiation he was exposed to. Nor in the years after the war did he talk about what must have been very demanding days, with experimental treatment of the many cruelly injured – not even to those closest to him. In the film, Domenig visits her grandmother, who is now ill with cancer, to hear what she can still say about the bomb and the time that followed it. However, the grandmother is one of several key people in the film, as the director has also obtained medical personnel who were present in somewhat the same way as her grandfather. Not least a charismatic former nurse, who is a clear voice in a silence that to a frighteningly large degree prevails in the country, if one is to believe this film.
Stigma. The Day the Sun Fell tells of the widespread social stigma associated with the bombing of Hiroshoma and Nagasaki, which to some extent still exists in Japan today. During the seven years the country was under American occupation after the war, it was forbidden to talk in detail about the atomic bomb and its harmful effects – and it was still kept quiet long after the country was independent again. Partly because the incident had naturally created deep trauma for many, but there were also those who hid that they had been exposed to radioactive radiation for fear of exclusion. This could be an obstacle to getting a job as well as a spouse.
"The stigma was very strong after the war, not least for the second generation victims of the bomb. But even today, the third generation can be discriminated against, preferably if you want to marry into a very old family, "said Aya Domenig when she met the press at the festival in Thessaloniki. "Then, for example, it may still happen that these families hire a private investigator to get information about the person's background. It is not taboo to talk about the bomb itself, but there is not much talk about the social implications it had after the war. " Domenig also said that many young people in Japan today do not have much knowledge – if any at all – of what happened in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, in discouraging contrast to large parts of the world.
Fukushima. While working on the documentary, the theme suddenly gained renewed relevance with the nuclear accident in Fukushima in 2011 – which thus also became a natural part of Domenig's film. There is little doubt that the awareness of nuclear power is significantly greater than two generations ago, not least after this accident, but the film also shows how in the public discourse one repeats the life-threatening mistake of underestimating the dangers associated with this. Although the Fukushima accident created a political will to downsize the country's nuclear industry, the country's government has since turned its back on this issue. According to Domenig, the management of the radioactive discharges has been deficient, and soon many of the 100 internal refugees after the leaks will be forced to move back to the increasingly polluted areas, because they no longer receive financial compensation.
The Day the Sun Fell is a strong, but also liberatingly warm and humorous account of the filmmaker's own close family, at the same time as it dares to talk about a taboo national trauma. And as much as it is a necessary reminder of historical events, the film warns of an ever-present threat of complete destruction, created by ourselves. To put it with a song that in this context should perhaps have been called «Expand og die »(or« fissions », if you want to be pedantic): It applies to you. That applies to me. It applies to everything that is.
