Hanabi
Asian Premiere
Ana Vaz France, Brazil 2026 107 min NC16 (Some Coarse Language)
Hanabi depicts the people, flora and fauna, and natural and urban landscapes affected by the invisible dangers of radioactivity. Intricate imagery, sound design, narration and text form a polyphonic narrative about the relationship between civilisation, change and catastrophe.
Made over ten years, Hanabi is loosely based on writer Yoko Hayasuke’s Diary of a Radioactive Brain, about the aftereffects of the Fukushima nuclear fallout following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. Shot on 16mm film, this hybrid work includes Ana Vaz’s correspondences, clandestine footage captured by a Japanese worker during decontamination operations, and archival material.
Conversations with residents and activists, as well as depictions of rural, urban and natural landscapes, create a picture of diverse living beings affected by the invisible dangers of radioactivity. The film’s images, music, sound design, narration and text are sometimes at variance, creating dissonances in its polyphonic narrative. Hanabi also plays with time scales: the seasonal passage of months, the decades after a catastrophe, and the eternity of nuclear contamination. At once devastating and tender, this film poses open-ended questions about the relationship between civilisation and entropy.
Synopsis Writer: Sam I-shan
1 Nov, Sun 11:00AM / 107 min
Oldham Theatre
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Hanabi
Fire Flower / Fleur de Feu / Flor de Fogo / 花火
Ana Vaz
France, Brazil
2026
Japanese, English
English
107 min
NC16 (Some Coarse Language)
Asian Premiere
Ana Vaz
Ana Vaz is a Brazilian artist and filmmaker whose works combine ethnography and speculation to explore the relationship between self and the other, highlighting the destructive practices of colonial modernity and their failed utopias. Working across documentary, narrative and experimental forms, her filmography includes Apiyemiyekî? (2019), which screened at Rotterdam, and It Is Night in America (2022), which competed at Locarno. Hanabi earned a Special Mention at Locarno.
Yukari Morimoto,
Kota Takeuchi,
K.A.
Ana Vaz,
Corinne Castel