Four Months After

Four months after the tsunami of 11 March 2011, this film takes stock of the destruction in the Tohoku port area on Japan’s Pacific coast. Or rather, it documents a moment of time suspended between the immensity of the damage and the slowness of eventual reconstruction. The slow circular pan shot that opens Four Months After gives us time to take in this in-between situation: scanning the piles of different materials and colours, the eye automatically seeks toidentify the semblance of a man-made shape – a roof, a car, a washed up boat, a building with its four walls still intact… Gradually, we notice the clean-up machines and a certain method in the piles of sorted “objects”, but no new structure rises from out of this vast junkyard. What will become of this place? When a car passes, when a man stops to look at the port from the belvedere or a group of cyclists cross the area, the weight of their humanity, of vital energy, seems almost strange in this landscape. Along with these few passers-by, Yuki Kawamura is indeed one of the few who deign to observe the scene.