We Pray All Nukes Will Eternally Disappear from the World [Nobumichi Asai, Japan, 2017]

Another sensitive and challenging short film from Nobumichi Asai, We Pray All Nukes Will Eternally Disappear from the World is also inspired by the events following Japan’s national disaster in 2011. Significantly, the film was first released online on August 6 at 8:15 am, the same date and time that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. In this way the film acts as a conceptual protest against the manufacturing of nuclear energy, using face mapping projections to demonstrate the massive destruction to our environment that nuclear energy is causing.

In this film, Asai presents us with a “radioactive visualizer”, a device that detects radioactivity in space using a Geiger counter, and converting each unit of radioactivity into light, thus enabling an accurate visual understanding of how much radiation exists around us. It makes for a shocking discovery as these beams of light strike the face of a woman in still pose. Out of context, these speckles of light seem delicate and majestic but, with an understanding of what they represent, are rendered dangerously carcinogenic.

We Pray All Nukes Will Eternally Disappear from the World is haunting in its execution. Simultaneously attractive and destructive, it gives us an informed insight into the unseen dangers of nuclear energy and leaves us with a lingering sense that the air around us is not always as harmless as it seems.