Film: Gift of Fire
Gift of Fire, a feature film completed in 2020, 75 years after the end of World War II, will screen in United States theaters beginning November 18th, 2021.
Check out Eleven Arts website for time and tickets: https://www.elevenarts.net/live-action/gift-of-fire
The film tells the story of a young Japanese researcher in World War II who struggles to honor his obligations to science, his family, his country, and his own morality while working to develop an atomic bomb.
During World War II, alongside research teams in the United States, Germany and many other countries around the world, Japan also joined the race to develop an atomic bomb.
This little known story was uncovered when Hiroshi Kurosaki, the writer and director of Gift of Fire, found the journals of this young scientist.
It is largely unknown that Japan had a department of the military attempting nuclear fission during the early 1940s. Gift of Fire looks inside the life of one young man attempting to create the weapon that would define an era.
Hiroshi Kurosaki, and the rest of the Japanese and American filmmakers who created Gift of Fire want Japan and the world to look at their involvement in the creation of the atomic bomb, and the multiple complex layers that drive a person to create and to destroy.
Just like J. Robert Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan Project researchers, scientists in Japan were wrestling with the polarity of trying to save their friends, family and country, while creating a weapon of mass destruction.
And just like those scientists creating the bomb, these researchers were pursuing a new field of scientific development, regardless of its uses.
Today, we know that this development has led to incredible tragedy, in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the discoveries of nuclear fission have also led to incredible opportunities with power and the understanding of the universe.
Gift of Fire deals with these dichotomies with grace, and asks us to remember that underneath it all, we are all just people.
The film was written and directed by Hiroshi Kurosaki (Goldfish/Hi No Sakana and Second Virgin), produced by Ko Mori (Prisoners of the Ghostland, Lords of Chaos), Katsuhiro Tsuchiya (Oh Lucy!, 37 Seconds),Takahiro Hamano (Lee Chang-dong's Burning), and is a co-production between Japanese broadcaster, NHK, and Eleven Arts Studios.
Award winning composer, Nico Muhly (The Reader), composed the score. Aeon Entertainment is distributing the film in Japan.
The film will have a limited release in the United States in November.
Check out Eleven Arts website for time and tickets: https://www.elevenarts.net/live-action/gift-of-fire
