August
morning 66 years ago hell literally broke loose here. Yet strolling through today's city this is hardly
noticeable. Business men are hauling taxi cabs, teenagers are streaming through the malls after
school, people are leading their everyday lives - just like on the 6. of August in 1945. The Japanese
filmmaker Mieko Azuma shows Hiroshima in a very unobtrusive way in this semi-fictitious
documentary about memory, remembrance and imagining the past.
For the German writer Johanna (Sylvana Krappatsch) her research trip to Hiroshima means also
going back to a place of her own childhood. Because her sick mothers memory about this time is
fading away Johanna has to rediscover places and people she only knows from old pictures. As she is
strolling through the modern streets and we alongside with her we get to know today's inhabitants of
Hiroshima. The bus driver who drops his uniform and white gloves after work for an electric guitar
or the old woman who drives up in a small car to her interview with Johanna. "I'm leading a normal
and happy life now" she says smiling after having remembered that particular morning from long
time ago.
Other people weren't so lucky. A young woman tells Johanna about her recently deceased
grandmother who had been standing next to another girl her own age the morning the bomb went
off. The girl shielded the grandmother from the heat flash and died days later. All her life had she
been remembering her, tells the young woman about her grandmother. Now she would do that
because without remembrance it would be as though the girl had never existed.
There's no historical footage, no mushroom cloud, no explosion in this film. Azuma doesn't want us
to leave the present we can so easily relate to. And this it what makes this minimalist film so
powerful. We are forced to find the history of Hiroshima in its people, faces, stories and rituals of
today.