JUNEAU, Alaska - A ball. A boat. A little girl's sandal. Filmmakers are working to find - and tell - the stories behind some of the items that have washed up on North American shores after the deadly 2011 tsunami in Japan.
"Lost and Found" aims to reunite items discovered by beachcombers and others who feel compelled to return them to their owners, co-director John Choi said.
A trailer for the film, which is still being produced, features two men affected by the items they've found. John Anderson found a volleyball on a beach in Washington state, and Marcus Eriksen, head of an expedition that sailed from Japan to Hawaii to look for tsunami debris last year, found part of a boat. Neither of the items has been linked to their original owners yet.
Eriksen said when his team first saw the boat, there was initial excitement "because we had been watching the ocean for a few weeks, just wondering what's out there. But when we approached this, it quickly went from fascination and excitement to, like, the sobering reality that this was someone's property, and we were very quickly filled with compassion about, you know, who lost this boat."
In the clip he said, "They didn't lose it. It was taken from them by natural disaster, so I feel compelled to find that individual."
Monday marks the second anniversary of the disaster, which devastated a long stretch of Japan's northeastern coast and killed thousands of people. The Japanese government estimated that 1.5 million tons of debris was floating in the ocean in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, but it's not clear how much is still floating.
Tsunami debris is tough to monitor and distinguish from the everyday debris - much of it from Asia - that has long been a problem along the West Coast. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said just 21 items of the more than 1,500 reports of possible tsunami debris - including balls, a motorcycle and boats - have been firmly traced back to the tsunami. But the agency lists scores of other items along the West Coast and across the Pacific Ocean as potentially linked.
Choi hopes to have the documentary released by the third anniversary of the disaster.
On the Web
Watch the trailer at:
Please Wait…