{"id":39644,"date":"2016-06-15T14:41:46","date_gmt":"2016-06-15T18:41:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=39644"},"modified":"2016-10-27T15:33:05","modified_gmt":"2016-10-27T19:33:05","slug":"documentary-makers-love-of-storytelling-began-at-brock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2016\/06\/documentary-makers-love-of-storytelling-began-at-brock\/","title":{"rendered":"Documentary maker\u2019s love of storytelling began at Brock"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was the people and their stories that captivated Nicolina Lanni.\u00a0What they lost. What they found. How they connected.<\/span><\/p>\n

In her first feature documentary film Lost & Found, the Brock University grad shares the stories of Japanese people who survived a devastating tsunami and the beachcombers half a world away who helped pick up the pieces.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about people and very personal, human stories,\u201d says Lanni (BA \u201905). \u201cIt was so clearly such a beautiful story and once it was in front of us, there was no way we were not going to tell it.\u201d<\/p>\n

An estimated 25-million tonnes of wreckage from Japan\u2019s 2011 earthquake and tsunami is drifting across the Pacific Ocean, often washing up on North America\u2019s shores. Filming took Lanni and her creative partner John Choi to Alaska, Washington, British Columbia and Japan.<\/p>\n

Lanni says the debris is more than just trash, it\u2019s remnants of the lives of the 20,000 people lost to the waves and the loved ones they left behind.<\/p>\n

The film follows the stories of beachcombers, scientists and government officials coming together to collect all that was lost, and reunite the items with their rightful owners in Japan.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t really focus on the disaster or the aftermath,\u201d Lanni says. \u201cOur film really focuses on the specific stories of friendship and these really unlikely relationships forged in the aftermath.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the friendships the film explores is between Alaskans David and Yumi Baxter and a woman they met in Japan after finding a yellow buoy wash up in Alaska. Sakiko Miura lost everything in the tsunami including the restaurant she ran with her late husband Keigo.<\/p>\n

The Baxters reunited Miura with a buoy with the character for<\/p>\n

Kei (short for Keigo) painted on it, which used to hang outside of her restaurant in a coastal town called Minamisanriku.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that the Kei buoy came back makes me think that my husband\u2019s soul is in it,\u201d Miura says in the documentary.<\/p>\n

The meaning of objects and our connection to them is explored throughout Lost & Found.<\/p>\n

The filmmakers made links that will last a lifetime, Choi says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people in our film are all incredibly close to us still. It\u2019s a family,\u201d he says. \u201cLost & Found is really about taking that leap of faith and the unlikeliness of people coming together from around the world and connecting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lanni says the work she did while making the film is drawn from her experiences at Brock, where she studied theatre and women\u2019s studies.<\/p>\n

It was at Brock that she started interviewing people and storytelling as part of a form of verbatim theatre called Collective Creation – when a group comes together, writes, collaborates and performs. She did it in Africa after graduation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would go into a town, talk to people and create a show and perform it for the community,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

After working in journalism for a time, Lanni switched to filmmaking and works as a director and producer in film and broadcast television including programming for The History Channel, Discovery Channel and Shaw Media.<\/p>\n

Lost & Found was commissioned by Shaw Communications alongside NHK Enterprises in Japan and SBS in Australia.<\/p>\n

Lanni says they also received the Hot Docs Shaw Completion Fund and the film had its theatrical premier at the Hot Docs Bloor Cinema in March for the fifth anniversary of the tsunami.<\/p>\n

For more information on the film and where to see it visit www.lostandfoundthefilm.ca. Global is showing the movie July 9 at 9 p.m.
\nLanni and Choi, who have a company called Frank Films, are currently working on a documentary about sinkholes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was the people and their stories that captivated Nicolina Lanni. What they lost. What they found. How they connected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":39645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3319,4052,37,1,4,4523],"tags":[4197,4195,4196,4193,4194,818],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39644"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39644"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39652,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39644\/revisions\/39652"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}