Zawawa

It is a strange and bitter irony that the US naval bombardment which launched the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 was called the ‘typhoon of steel’, invoking the turbulent winds that annually buffet this small island. Okinawans sought shelter from the battle in natural features of the environment such as caves and within sugar cane fields, creating memories that reside in the sounds of these places today. This film, the result of a ten-year collaboration between a landscape artist, an acoustic scientist and an anthropologist attempts to listen in on and make sense of these sounds through the stories of individuals and the recordings of these sounds. Their words, solidified as text and witness to the history of the US occupation of the island and expressed through the mixing of images and sounds of natural elements, military machinery and ritual practices convey the experience of many Okinawan lives, suspended between the American wars of the past, present and future.