Tokyo Olympics documentary to showcase Fukushima

TOKYO Japanese director Naomi Kawase, named Tuesday to make a documentary film about the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, said she hopes to focus on reconstruction efforts in the northern Fukushima region of the country.

The area was devastated in 2011 by an earthquake and tsunami and a resulting nuclear disaster. The Japanese government hopes the Olympics will show the region is recovering and that products made there are safe.

Some Olympic softball and baseball games will be played there to showcase the region.

“This will be an opportunity for me to show the world where Japan stands and what kind of changes Japan will be undergoing,” Kawase said through an interpreter.

Kawase is highly acclaimed and became the youngest director to receive the Camera d’or prize at the Cannes Film Festival with her 1997 film Suzaku.

The Tokyo documentary will be financed by the International Olympic Committee and the local organizing committee. The film is a requirement under the hosting contract.

The documentary of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics by Kon Ichikawa, titled Tokyo Olympiad, is generally regarded as one of the most important in the genre, along with Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia from the 1936 Berlin Games.

Ichikawa’s film was controversial at the time and unsettled organizers, who wanted a more traditional treatment of the Olympics, rather than Ichikawa’s poetic view.

A Japanese reporter, posing a question to Kawase, described her typical film as quiet and slowflowing. He then asked how this approach suited something fastmoving like the Olympics.

“When it comes to the Tokyo Olympics, we cannot just say it will be speedy, just because it’s a sports-related theme,” she said.