Better known to stateside genre fans as the director behind “Cold Fish” and the epic and weird “Love Exposure,” for his latest effort, Sion Sono is ripping directly from the headlines and seemingly playing it totally straight. Inspired by the 2011 earthquake that rocked Japan and unleashed a nuclear disaster that still has repercussions today, Sono has put together “The Land of Hope,” and as you might expect from this new U.K. trailer for the film, it’s pretty intense stuff.
The picture is set in the future, in the fictional Nagashima prefecture, and follows the Ono family, who after a nuclear incident, are faced with the choice of leaving their home—which is just outside the radiation zone—or fleeing to safety instead of risking exposure. “Japan is the only country in the world that has experienced the horror of nuclear first-hand in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now we’ve had a nuclear accident even worse than Chernobyl. It is only our responsibility to warn the world by reporting our experiences. This movie is my answer to that,” Sono said in a statement. “It depicts what is happening in Fukushima and in Japan right now, through the story of one family. The nuclear accident severely tests the strong bond of this family.”
Doing the festival rounds last year, “The Land of Hope” is still without a U.S. distributor or date. But for those of you in the U.K., it arrives on DVD and Blu-ray on August 26th. Watch below. [Twitch]