Les enfants d'Hiroshima

Kaneto Shindo's movie is without any doubt one of the best ever made. It deals head-on with one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of mankind: the dropping for pure geopolitical reasons of a nuclear bomb on a city thereby killing thousands of innocents citizens in the twinkling of an eye and wreaking havoc for centuries to come on a country (and also very slightly on the whole living world) because the human genetic basic material has been damaged.

Kaneto Shindo's movie shows preeminently that the fate of the world and the human species depends solely on the responsible or irresponsible behavior of every single person on earth. In this movie, a teacher is looking for survivors among the children of her kindergarten class. There are only three. On her own initiative, she tries to secure a more hopeful future for one of those.

This impeccably played movie (also by the children) is simply unforgettable. A must see. For a geopolitical interpretation of the dropping of the atomic bomb I highly recommend the book 'The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb' by Gar Alperovitz.

Nominated for the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953, which was the highest prize at the time; Children of Hiroshima is Kaneto Shindo's third film and he shows that he is a good director. The first thing that caught my attention was its excellent cinematography and its musical score.

Children of Hiroshima follows a kindergarten teacher Takako, as she returns to Hiroshima after its bombing and meets with her former pupils, six years after teaching them. Only a handful remain. The story does not follow some basic movie template. Children are the theme of the story, rather than indicators of major plot points, we really get to know the people Takako visits, as we learn the stories of their past and the life they live as a result of the bombing. There are many great scenes, one where a plane flies overhead, and although historically, we know that Hiroshima isn't attacked again, we get a feeling of how frightened the residents must feel.

It's amazing how prolific Kaneto Shindo has been, with a total of 43 directing credits, and many more writing credits. He even has a film in post-production right now, at the age of 95.

This movie has been released into the public domain, so it can be legally downloaded off of the web.

As a narrative this film is not particularly strong, but its context is of course extraordinary. Made seven years after the war just after the American occupation had ended, it dramatizes, and more importantly humanizes, the horrible consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima. It has a kindergarten teacher returning to that city to see the three students of her old class who survived, and paying her respects to family members who perished. The scenes where she is standing in ruins, remembering bygone events of happier times, or looking up into the sky or down at the river, are particularly poignant. To see the city itself in 1952 is fascinating, to see the people (even dramatized by actors) heartbreaking. The film wisely steers clear of the complicated question of whether dropping the bomb was necessary, and I think that's how it ought to be viewed; it simply shows us that in war, innocent people suffer, and in the new atomic age, in unprecedented ways, far larger and more monstrous than ever before. It's stunning to me that this was not seen in America until 2011.

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.

Takako Ishikawa stars as a woman from Hiroshima who left it shortly after the bombing to live with her aunt and uncle on a nearby island. She lost the rest of her family in the disaster. Four years afterward, she returns to check up on old acquaintances. Ishikawa is basically an audience surrogate, as we see how the people of Hiroshima are doing. The answer: not that well, as you might expect. The city is still devastated, people are dying of radiation poisoning, many are horribly injured. But life goes on, represented by the children of the city, many of them orphans, but they live their lives as carefree as they can. Ishikawa feels guilty for leaving the city and not being able to help her townspeople, but she finds hope in a young boy, the grandson of one of her father's employees. Osamu Takizawa is now a blind beggar, and can't really take care of the boy himself (he lives in an orphanage). Ishikawa offers to adopt the boy, but he is understandably reluctant to leave his grandfather behind. This is a touching film, but it is pretty two dimensional. It kept reminding me of the far superior Grave of the Fireflies, and the only tears I shed during it came about because I was thinking of the Isao Takahata anime (a rare film which I just cannot recall without tearing up). Takizawa gives a pretty good performance. Ishikawa went on to star in Shindo's three most famous films, Onibaba, The Naked Island and Kuroneko. The very unsubtle score is by Akira Ifukube, who would go on to score Gojira and tons of other kaiju eiga.