On 11 March 2011, in Japan, an earthquake and a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. An exclusion zone was set up and 250,000 people were displaced. A few weeks later a group of Japanese filmmakers reacted by forming the Ukishima Collective. Anticipating the total evacuation of a country rendered uninhabitable by future nuclear disasters, what united the Ukishima Collective was no ordinary ambition: to film all 6,852 islands in the Japanese archipelago before it becomes deserted and to bring these images together in a film several hundred hours’ long. At the end of the summer of 2011, soon after forming, the collective posted a manifesto on their website. It stressed the urgent need to film these landscapes and ways of life before the final exile: “We will pit the immensity of our desire to film against the enormity of the anthropological disaster: hundreds of hours of images against thousands of years of nothingness”. After three years of activity the Ukishima Collective announced that they had filmed 119 islands. Since then the group has shown no further signs of life. No one knows what has become of it.
Philippe Rouy
