35mm | 1984 | Directed by Hayao Miyazaki | Japan | 117 minutes | Japanese with English subtitles
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In 35mm! One thousand years after a devastating war called the Seven Days of Fire reduced the planet to a sterile wasteland, a vast, toxic jungle spreads its deadly spores, endangering what little is left of humanity. As Princess Nausicäa endeavors to protect the Kingdom of the Valley of the Wind from this poisonous miasma, she learns that a faraway empire is seeking to develop the same weapons that caused the apocalypse a millennium before. Hand-drawn frame by frame under the direction of Academy Award winner Hayao Miyazaki, NAUSICÄA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (1984) was a critical and commercial success whose momentum led directly to the founding of Studio Ghibli the following year. A masterpiece far ahead of its time, the film will resonate with those who, like Nausicäa, have inherited a permanently toxic planet.
Cinema of Contamination stages contact, confrontations, and entanglements with enigmatic toxins and landscapes. Spanning suburban California, the Andean mountain range, a forbidden zone, and a poisonous forest, the series examines how to make meaning within ecological collapse and in the aftermath of dictatorship and war.
