The filmmakers started shooting within three weeks of the disaster to show us what we didn't know. The movie opens quietly—with the sound of wind and a shot of reactors in the hazy distance, then a close-up on cherry blossoms catching the breeze on a spring day. We later learn that the wind blew radiation in the direction of those fleeing ground zero. We also learn that the Japanese government failed to report the level of radiation and those residents were contaminated.
Fourteen hundred of Futaba's inhabitants fled to an abandoned high school 250 kilometers away, and a year later, 500 still live there on the floor, in classrooms, eating rice gruel, trying to pass the time, mourning their dead relatives and friends, and feeling betrayed by a government and a corporation (The Tokyo Electric Power Company, TEPCO) that has not apologized to them individually or told them what will become of their town or if they might ever go home.