Hiroshima

This stunning, 1953 Japanese film confronts what seems to have been contemporaneous silence and stigmatization over the lingering health impact of an atom bomb America dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Eight years later, Hiroshima, which is neither conventional narrative, documentary nor docudrama, but more of a free-floating nightmare, presents young students coping with leukemia and demanding uncomfortable conversations about radiation diseases. This sequence is followed by a staggering recreation of the hours and days following the nuclear explosion that (along with the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki) led to the end of World War II in the Pacific. If you think you've seen convincing scenes of zombie-like hordes lurching through the aftermath of an apocalypse, then you haven't witnessed anything until you've watched Hiroshima. Just how director Hideo Sekigawa found hundreds of actors to play bloodied, burned, and shocked victims of the blast, trapped under burning rubble, crawling in tattered clothes over shattered concrete, or stumbling without bearings or destination while crying out for missing children or parents, surpasses understanding. The obvious goal here was to preserve the granular memory of what happened and end denial. Toward that goal, Sekigawa succeeds with unsettling success. Strongly recommended.