Hanami
(Hanami)

In Japanese, the term “hanami” denotes the custom of viewing the bloom of cherry blossoms (sakura) in springtime. What mysterious oceanic journey takes it from Japan’s volcanic archipelago to the equally eruptive Cape Verde, where Denise Fernandes quite literally roots her debut feature film? A word, a tree, a land that everyone either seems to have left or wants to leave, and Nana, or more precisely the three ages of Nana from her birth, her feverish early childhood to her seventeenth year. Nana is left behind by her mother, Nia, who went far way to get treated for a strange illness and never returned. Avoiding yet not repressing the coming-of-age story, Hanami offers an unpredictable, ambitious and poetic reflection on the Cape Verde people torn between here and elsewhere, between the pain of exile and insular isolation, a rock between land and sea. JB