Norway 2021, 70 min Director FREDRIK S. HANA
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival, this thrilling cinematic investigation follows a young Norwegian man, Marius Lunde, as he attempts to locate his estranged mother, who left for Japan and cut off all ties with her family when Lunde was just 5 years old. Bonded by a love of film, childhood friends Lunde and director Fredrik S. Hana decide to capture Lunde’s journey through masterfully-rendered, genre-specific re-enactments that range from film noir to J-horror to the samurai epic. For this inventive approach to non-fiction filmmaking, the duo stage the intricate chapters of their quest—with Lunde as the leading man and Lunde behind the camera—alongside raw handheld footage, cleverly blurring the lines between fact and fiction, real and imagined. Occasionally delirious, ultimately profound, and thoroughly captivating, Code Name: Nagaski shows the therapeutic and cathartic power that cinema can hold. In Norwegian, English, and Japanese with English subtitles