Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani

Contaminated Home

HD, short film, colour, 5.1. surround, 22 min., 2021

10 years after the nuclear accident in Japan at the Daiichi Fukushima power plant Fischer & el Sani are recalling the catastrophe and its terrible consequences with their film Contaminated Home. The film consists of photographs and testimonies from a Japanese family who were forced to leave their home after the nuclear disaster on March 11th, 2011. In the months after the evacuation of emergency, the family periodically returns to their home with a photographic camera and a Geiger Counter. They discover themselves in an unlikely paradox: with human absence nature took over the gardens and paths through the woods, on the other hand, an invisible entity fills all places and without giving any sign of itself, it mortally pollutes every piece of land, each plant, each room in the house, each of the four cats they had to abandon.
Fischer & el Sani build this touching portrait of the process of detachment from a family that still remains linked to an infected space. Now, abandoned, surrounded by hundreds of dead insects and invasive weeds, radiation doses remain as high as at the beginning. The narration based on conversations with Chuya and Chiaki Hashimoto confesses all this with an uncomfortable calm and the photographic images resemble a disturbing family album of a frozen life.

Movie
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Contaminated Home
HD, colour, stereo, 22 min., 2021
(2.30 min. excerpt)