The Land of Hope

The Ono family live on a farm: the old couple, their son and his wife. An earthquake hits the nuclear plant nearby. The authorities draw a twenty-kilometre evacuation line, and it runs straight through this family's garden. The neighbours are cleared out immediately; the Onos are officially on the safe side. The old man will not leave his ill wife, while his daughter-in-law, who is pregnant, has to go. Sion Sono made the film after the Fukushima disaster, shooting in Fukushima itself, in the evacuated areas. Rather than naming the event directly he invented a fictional prefecture. What the film is really about is a line deciding who stays and who leaves.