In his second full-length documentary, Swiss director Andrea Pellerani gives us a guided tour of what a post-industrial, post-growth, or even an eerily post-human future might look like. We are on the south-western Japanese island of Ikeshima. Once a thriving mining outpost that was home to 8,000 people, since the facility’s closure in 2001 it has been reduced to just 100 mostly elderly holdouts. As the residents fish the grey sea off abandoned wharves, inspect pregnant cats and loiter around derelict lots, there is a sense they inhabit the set of a long-shuttered stage play, and are awaiting new lines.
Though it begins with long tracking shots of greenery choking empty apartment blocks, Dreaming an Island isn’t exactly ruin porn. Pellerani is more interested in the vestiges of human activity, and milks a distinct absurdity from the stalwart locals. One collects “fun” beach flotsam, there are guides waiting rather optimistically for an upswing in coal-mining tourism, while Ikeshima’s sole restaurateur hopes for a customer. “Is there anything interesting to see?” asks one who finally turns up. “In what sense interesting?” she replies.
The existential quotient spikes in the sections at the island’s school, where 11 teachers cater to just two pupils. A tutor has one of them running sprint drills out on the training field, preparing for some hypothetical athletics meet.
No doubt because it’s inherent to the subject matter, Ikeshima’s stasis makes it tricky for Pellerani to find dramatic through-lines; filling even 76 minutes feels like a struggle. Ikeshima is a canary in the coalmine for Japan, which, with its plummeting birth rate and stagnant economy, is often itself talked up as a canary for the rest of the developed world. But if this wan afterlife really is our future, then Pellerani also emphasises a dutiful bravery in affirming old ways and believing they can be renewed. In a peppy coda, children and teachers arrive at an old people’s home to present them with artwork, play darts and sing old-time ditties. Mines can be exhausted but human connection endures in this fond not-quite-swansong.
• Dreaming an Island is available on True Story from 24 March
