Prophecy

This rare documentary is one of the very last efforts from preeminent documentarist/activist Susumu Hani best known for his feature films. This one is a short documentary about the 1945 atomic bombing and its devastating consequences. The film came out of the "10 Foot Movement". A movement organized by the Japan Peace Museum, which mobilized Japanese citizen activists to buy back small segments of film footage of the effects of the atomic bomb from the U.S. National Archives. The film combines recent footage of survivors of the atomic bomb with American archival footage, portraying the sorrow of atomic bomb survivors in the cold war period. The dramatic protagonist of this documentary is Taniguchi a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. He is seen as he patiently awaits his turn in a hospital waiting room. He was 16 at the time of the bombing and spent the next 35 years in and out of hospitals for treatments and cure for his tumor mutilated body. Through Taniguchi's red thread we see images of the time following the bombing. These are mostly footage shot either by Japanese civilians or by US military departments most of which have been censored for years since they contain some of the most striking and disturbing images most likely to affect the arms race between US and other countries at the time. This movie which feels even more contemporary today prevents us to forget that both bombings caused 60.000 deaths in Hiroshima and 30.000 in Nagasaki, but during the following 5 months those deaths rose respectively to 140.000 and 60.000. From the testimony of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki echos an appeal that yields a prophetic meaning: "The dreadful agonies and sufferings that we went through should never be repeated in the future". Also to be mentioned, the music score is by none other than maestro Toru Takemitsu" (dimax9)