Recollections

While clearing the debris after the March 2011 tsunami in Japan, rescuers in and near the city of Yamamoto found around 750,000 photos. They had been damaged by sea water, oil and mud, and they were stuck together and often unrecognizable. When young Yuji Mizoguchi realized how much a photo could mean to a surviving relative, he started looking for ways to repair the images. With the help of 500 volunteers, his Project Salvage Memory has now restored more than a 250,000 photographs, which are available for viewing at their photo center. Mizoguchi explains that one particular photo turned out to be of priceless value: “A man once told me he had no pictures of his wife, and that her body hadn't been found, so he coudn't get his head around it. With the restored picture, a funeral was possible.” This benevolent project is the very antithesis of the tsunami’s destructiveness, and the film concentrates on the volunteers, the victims, the people they lost, but never on the event itself. There is no need for such images anyway, because the rows of neatly built shelter homes with little plastic porches say far more than the wall of mud that destroyed in a moment what it had taken a lifetime to build. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)