I’m So Sorry (2021) dir. Zhao Liang

In a quiet forest, a sign warns of radiation hazard. “Is this the past or the future?” muses the masked figure who appears like a kind of ghost in nuclear disaster areas. At a time when nuclear power may be re-emerging as an alternative to fossil fuels, this calmly observed and compelling tour takes us to places that may serve as a warning. We see the desolate landscapes and overgrown ruins around Fukushima and Chernobyl, abandoned houses with photos the former residents left behind, the dismantling of a nuclear power plant in Germany, militant demonstrators, and ghostly underground tunnels in Finland, where highly radioactive waste has to be stored for the next thousand centuries. But we also share intimate moments with a Japanese couple in their emergency home, and meet two lonely elderly people who, despite the radiation, have returned to their abandoned village in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. These moving encounters offer a human counterbalance to the silent threat. I’m So Sorry, a prophetic panorama with unexpectedly poetic moments, premiered in 2021 in Cannes in the new Cinema for the Climate section.