The List: Movies About the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Movie #2 – White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Year – 2007

Whit Light/Black Rain was made 60+ years after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The filmmakers interviewed over 100 survivors before finally deciding to focus on fourteen. The film is a collection of riveting firsthand accounts including:

• A young military doctor who was first on the scene and began immediately treating survivors only to continue doing so for 60-years.
• A woman who, as a small child, convinced her family to move to Nagasaki just weeks before the blast.
• A girl who was the sole-survivor from an elementary school of over six-hundred.

There are emotional impact of the survival stories is compounded by how Japanese society treated survivors. They became pariahs. Survivors often married other survivors because other people wouldn’t have them. It wasn’t unusual for a survivor’s children to have no idea of their parent’s trauma; even 60-years later.