Hiroshima Mon Amour

Selected by Kota Ezawa

French actress Emmanuelle Riva (2012 Oscar nominee for Amour), in Japan to make a “peace film,” finds herself, in the course of her brief affair with Japanese architect Eiji Okada (Woman in the Dunes), compulsively returning to her own traumatic post-war experiences. Asked to do an anti-nuclear documentary, Resnais opted instead for a feature exploring mutual guilts and the power of memory, written by novelist Marguerite Duras. Winner of the International Critics’ prize at Cannes, Hiroshima was kept out of the main competition to avoid offending the U.S.

“A complex yet compelling tour de force—as a patent plea for peace and the abolition of atomic warfare, as a poetic evocation of love lost and momentarily found, and as a curiously intricate but intriguing montage of thinking on several planes in Proustian style.”
– A. H. Weiler, The New York Times

Part of the Fraenkel Film Festival