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Hiroyuki Kawaida Movies

2005  
 
Masaki Iwana, a master of the Japanese dance and theater discipline known as butoh, makes his debut as a director and screenwriter with this stylized fusion of drama and fantasy. Seven years after the end of World War II, a young boy living in Tokyo is running after a handful of propaganda leaflets dropped by an airplane when he happens upon a crumbling mansion. The boy looks in through the windows and discovers four sickly and deformed adults are living inside, all suffering from a mysterious ailment that is aggravated by sunlight. The four, made captives by their poor health, want to be put out of their misery, as does the failed kamikaze pilot who guards them, but the authorities will only allow them to be euthanized if there is a group of five, and when one of them dies of natural causes, the others fall into a deep depression. When they discover a tunnel that leads to a ghetto populated by other lost souls, they set out on a journey of both desperation and hope. Filmed in France, Vermilion Souls was shot in 2004 but was not completed until 2008, receiving its world premiere at the 2008 Lyon Asian Film Festival in Lyon, France. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

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2003  
 
Add Radiation: A Slow Death - A New Generation of Hibakusha to Queue Add Radiation: A Slow Death - A New Generation of Hibakusha to top of Queue  
By the early 21st century, nuclear warfare had attained the stigma it deserved among the common populace, though the world's superpowers continued to stockpile nuclear weapons, and discussion persisted of such countries as Iran and South Korea amassing this capability - suggesting untoward degrees of destructive power. Also disturbing were the numerous cases in which western leaders continued to speak of "peaceful uses" of nuclear power, despite the almost universal knowledge of how destructive nuclear waste can be. This documentary program explores the many aspects of nuclear fallout, including physiological detriment from nuclear bomb attacks that is passed down, hereditarily, from generation to generation (as discussed on-camera by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki); it also introduces the audience to many individuals whose lives have been scarred or severely damaged by incidental radiation in the atmosphere (such as Washington State farmers working near the Hanford plutonium factory), and such grossly irresponsible casualties of nuclear activity as Iraqi children hit with radiation from depleted uranium ammunition during Operation Desert Storm. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

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