With: Rosalie Thomass (Marie), Kaori Momoi (Satomi), Nami Kamata (Nami), Moshe Cohen (Moshe), Honsho Hayasaka (Jushoku), Nanoko (Yuki), Aya Irizuki (Toshiko)
Director/Screenplay: Doris Dörrie
Producers: Harold Kugler, Molly von Furstenberg
Production co: Olga Film
Photography: Hanno Lentz
Editor: Frank Müller
Music: Ulrike Haage
REVIEWS

“‘A radiation vacation’ – as the protagonist who survived 3/11 calls her brief encounter with a German volunteer – sums up the gallows humor of  Doris Dörrie’s post-disaster traumedy, shot right in the middle of Fukushima’s Exclusion Zone. 

Lensed in poetic black-and-white with the German helmer-scribe’s trademark whimsical fantasy and peppered with absurdist cross-cultural gags, Fukushima, mon amour offers a refreshingly quirky perspective on a heavy subject, suggesting that sometimes audiences, and perhaps even victims, need a vacation from misery and pity…

In addition to the more exotic and crowd-pleasing Cherry Blossoms (2008), also about a German traveler trying to overcome personal loss by soaking up foreign culture, Dörrie has set other films in Japan, such as Enlightenment Guaranteed.  Having traveled all over the country some 25 times, she evinces a deep understanding of Japanese aesthetics and social dynamics… her penchant for drawing awkward misfits allows her to portray both German and Japanese protagonists alike as strangers in a strange land, and to dramatize the survivors’ difficulty in comprehending their  situation.”

— Maggie Lee, Variety 
FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS*
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Waitati
Tuesday, 6 March, 8:00pm

Palmerston North
Monday, 12 March, 6:00pm

Timaru
Tuesday, 3 April, 7:00pm

Dunedin
Wednesday, 11 April, 7:30pm

Nelson
Thursday, 19 April, 6:00pm

Auckland
Monday, 30 April, 6:30pm

Whanganui
Monday, 7 May, 7:00pm

Canterbury
Monday, 14 May, 7:30pm

Hamilton
Monday, 21 May, 8:00pm

Tauranga
Wednesday, 6 June, 6:15pm

​*Non-members welcome by donation (notes only please)​
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German Cinema selection presented in co-operation with the Goethe Institut