In this Japanese semi-documentary, a teacher and her ex-students offer their view of the horrible aftermath of the A-bomb in their city. The film was designed to generate sympathy from the American people responsible for the devastation. — Sandra Brennan

This 1952 early work of director Kaneto Shindo is one of the earliest japanese independent film production. The story is about a young schoolteacher (the great actress Nobuko Otowa) visiting the decimated city. It wears its heart on its sleeve and lacks subtlety, but the film is also a fascinating document of the city and its people in the early postwar recovery.

Largely overlooked today, this was one of the first films made during the Allied occupation after WW2.Very powerful in its content, it shows the devastation caused by the Atomic bomb, and by use of a fictional storyline, portrays the struggle of the ordinary Japanese people in dealing with the aftermath.

I last saw this film in 1976 and it is still vivid in my memory.


http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/shindo.html

Children of the Hiroshima opens to a shot of healthy children performing calisthenics in the schoolyard of an idyllic fishing village before being dismissed by their schoolteacher, Takako (Nobuko Otowa) for summer recess. Since the loss of her parents and sister four years earlier in the bombing of Hiroshima, Takako has remained on the island with her gentle and well-intentioned aunt, resigned in the belief that the memory of the fateful event is best left relegated to the past. With time on her hands, Takako decides to take an extended trip to her hometown to visit a former colleague and, near Kokutaiji temple, encounters her father's former assistant, Iwakichi (Osamu Takizawa) panhandling near a well-traveled bridge. Blinded and disfigured, Iwakichi is unable to find work to support his only surviving family, his grandson, Taro who has been sent away to live in an orphanage. Upon learning that three children from the kindergarten class had survived the immediate effects of the bomb, Takako decides to pay a visit to each of the students, and in the process, becomes a compassionate witness to its aftermath.

Filmed in 1952 shortly after the end of American occupation, Children of Hiroshima reflects the contemplative, often apocalyptic, testimonial cinema of the hibakusha - the survivors of the atomic bomb. By interweaving real-life accounts of actual survivors with the observations of a fictional protagonist, Kaneto Shindo creates a deeply personal, yet objective chronicle of the world's harrowing first encounter with the destructive potential of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945: the highly formalized montage of everyday life unfolding against the sound of a ticking clock that resolutely moves ever closer towards the appointed bombing time of 8:15 AM; the haunting, reenacted shot of an anonymous victim's "vaporized" charred outline on an outdoor staircase; the flashback image of children reciting nursery rhymes in circular formation that cuts to two broken, sequentially rotated shots of the former kindergarten teachers standing on a vacant lot of the former playground. Based on a collection of thoughtful poems and stories written by the young survivors of the Hiroshima bombing (compiled by Arata Osada), Children of Hiroshima is a pensive, compelling, and provocative account of the residual effects and incalculable human toll of the atomic bomb's tragic and indelible legacy.



See ya.   

Dirigiendo quien dirige ni me lo pienso... ¡muchas gracias, OZN!

It's never too late....