Brazilian experimental filmmaker Ana Vaz says her new feature, “Hanabi” (“Fire Flower”), explores the lasting social and psychological effects of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Premiering in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente section, the film uses images of farming, gardens and fireworks to contrast ideas of healing with what Vaz sees as Japan’s uneasy silence and normalisation of catastrophe.

Vaz loosely adapts Yoko Hayasuke’s “Journal of a Radioactive Brain”, drawing on its fragmented diary form and its criticism of everyday capitalism after Fukushima. She argues that the disaster’s scale cannot be understood through official measurements alone, and includes an unscripted reversal of Hayasuke’s line about preferring to be a zombie rather than a mother, recorded when Vaz had just learned she was pregnant. “Hanabi” is Vaz’s longest film and the first she did not edit herself.