Salt: trace, absence of water, passage of time, invading epidemic, living cemetery. Water: manoeuvre, absolute value, fertility, rhizomes, chance. Cotton: corruption, economic issues, hydrophily, desertification. The world has become a vast dried out planet, where the growing of cotton, over exploited for economical reasons is the main cause of desertification. A saline desert covers acres of dried out land where strange salt trees appear. This phenomenon echoes an even greater ecological disaster, the desertification of the Aral Sea. And man is always responsible...

Planet A

In February 2012, I went to Ishinomaki, a town North of Tokyo that was half destroyed by the tsunami of March 11th, 2011, to meet the disaster victims who now live in temporary housing. I spent several days in the North, under the snow, listening to these people talk candidly about what they had lived through, telling their own stories without the media as an intermediary. Their testimonies were terrifying, harsh and sad, but at the same time touching, sincere and human. From the pictures and interviews that I collected, I decided to make a film, not to reflect how awful the events were, but to communicate the singular and even surreal nature of each person’s experience. My intention wasn’t so much to focus on this particular event in Japan, but rather to make these stories more universal as a way of paying tribute to all the victims of natural disasters throughout the world.