An often heartrending essay on grief, and on how humans and nature rebuild after trauma, Jennifer Rainsford’s lyrically titled All of Our Heartbeats Are Connected Through Exploding Stars is set against the backdrop of incidents of March 11, 2011 when the largest earthquake in modern history hit Japan and then, some thirty minutes later, the dark tsunami waves roared in over the coast of North-Eastern Japan dragging cars, homes and lives back out to sea.
Opening like any self-respecting disaster film – all red glow and eerie smoke slowly rising– writer/director Rainsford narrates: “On March 11, 2001, the earth started trembling. The earthquake lasted for six minutes. It shifted the earth’s rotation which made our day on earth 1.8 milli-seconds shorter. It created the largest tsunami in Japan’s modern history.”
The film introduces bus-driver Yasu, who lost his wife in the tsunami when a bank she worked in was swept away. He searched for her in the debris, but when there was no sign he started searching the sea. He has subsequently made some 100 dives in search of his lost wife.
Sachiko sleep-walks through her life keeps writing letters to her husband who was taken by the wave, while Satoko is another young woman who struggles to overcome her trauma from the disaster. She is haunted by “the sound of earthquake alerts beeping and the smell of dead fish.” Her post-traumatic fear leaves her in tears laying on her couch unable to move. ”I shouldn’t have survived,” she says mournfully. “I felt my outside and inside were completely different. My friendships collapsed. They realised they could die the next day.”
On the other side of the ocean, on the Hawaiian island of Kaho’olawe, a group of volunteers are gathering to clean the beach of Japanese tsunami debris – called ‘ghost nets’ – floating in from the Ocean.
Rainsford says in her narration: “I want to tell you about the broken heart syndrome. It was first discovered in 1990 after the Kobe Earthquake. It changes the shape of the human heart. Symptoms are the same as those of a heart attack: chest-pain and shortness of breath – Takotsubo cardio myopathy…it appears almost exclusively in women that are suffering from severe emotional or physical stress such as losing a loved one or experiencing a natural disaster like an earthquake.”
As well as addressing the impact on humans, the film also dwells on flora and fauna. Some plants have survived and started to grow amidst the ruined landscape, while the film also looks at the strange undersea creatures and micro-organisms associated with the tragedy. As Rainsford says in the narration: “In the year before the earthquake the ocean floor was trembling and the oarfish (known as the ‘messengers from the sea gods palace’) started to swim from deep in the ocean to the surface, believed to be an omen of earthquake.
Told in the form of a lyrical film essay, backed up with scientific research and a striking score from Teho Teardo, All of Our Heartbeats are Connected Through Exploding Stars is a memorable and gently engrossing tale of the interconnectedness of all living organisms on planet Earth. It is a film about loss, death, memory and ultimately regrowth.
Sweden, 2022, 77mins
Dir/scr: Jennifer Rainsford
Production: Momento Film, Film in Skåne, WHAP
International sales: Taskovski Films
Producers: Mirjam Gelforn, David Herdies, Michael Krotkiewski
Cinematography: Karolina PajakIga, Iga Mikler, Wojtek Sulezycki
Editor: Camille Cotte, Amalie Westerlin Tjellesen
Music: Teho Teardo
With: Yasu, Satoko, Sachiko, Yukiko, Mahie
