Some still remember how the cicadas in Nagasaki fell silent in the first few minutes after the atomic bomb was dropped. An eerie, deadly silence.
Eighty years later, their chirping rises once again over the green hills of the Japanese island. At the foot of these hills, we follow Noriko as she clears out her mother’s house. Between stacks of boxes, she packs up porcelain for a retirement home and, together with her sisters, pragmatically checks the condition of old household appliances. Noriko – who lives in Canada – is grappling not only with the overgrown garden but also with the dense thicket of silence. She finds letters to her mother – accounts of the suffering endured after the atomic bombing, a time her family never spoke of. Through these letters, we come to understand the profound sense of shame still carried by the Hibakusha, or survivors. Filmmaker Laurence Lévesque accompanies Noriko through Nagasaki, moving beyond memorial plaques in public spaces, and instead creating her own resistant act of remembrance. By listening to witnesses and looking at the landscape over and over again, Noriko constructs a multi-layered document. The film’s immersive camerawork heightens our awareness, enabling us to connect the present with the past, and urging us not only to remember but to heed history’s warning against repetition.

German premiere