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Anti-war films are generally harrowing experiences by their very nature. Whereas most movies draw audiences into worlds of wonder or whimsy, most anti-war pieces focus on the gritty reality of mankind’s constant conflicts. In some ways, they overlap with horror, shining light on uncomfortable truths that are often ignored. Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima is no exception.

Unlike its later 1995 Canadian-Japanese counterpart, Sekigawa’s black-and-white 1953 docudrama focuses on the human toll of mankind’s most dangerous technological achievement. Its contents are fittingly horrific, often bordering on impossibly upsetting, but its message is more prescient than ever. Sekigawa never pulls punches. Hiroshima is an uncompromising, loud, and inescapable recreation of the nuclear hellscape wrought upon the then-thriving city. Its backing score, composed by Godzilla’s Akira Ifukube, only adds to the nauseating whirlwind of horrific suffering. Of course, these aspects of the film are intentional choices. It’s meant to be viscerally unsettling,...

Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima (1953) is currently available on Blu-ray From Arrow Academy.

Hiroshima (1953) is a powerful evocation of the devastation wrought by the world s first deployment of the atomic bomb and its aftermath, based on the written eye-witness accounts of its child survivors compiled by Dr. Arata Osada for the 1951 book Children Of The A Bomb: Testament Of The Boys And Girls Of Hiroshima.

Adapted for the screen by independent director Hideo Sekigawa and screenwriter Yasutaro Yagi, Hiroshima combines a harrowing documentary realism with moving human drama, in a tale of the suffering, endurance and survival of a group of teachers, their students and their families. It boasts a rousing score composed by Akira Ifukube (Godzilla) and an all-star cast including Yumeji Tsukioka, Isuzu Yamada and Eiji Okada, appearing alongside an estimated 90,000 residents from the city as extras, including many survivors from that fateful day on 6th August 1945.

Hiroshima...

As part of their release slates for the months June and July 2020 Arrow Academy will release the classic Nagisa Oshima “Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence” starring David Bowie and Hideo Sekigawa’s powerful documentary “Hiroshima”

Synopsis for “Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence”

David Bowie stars in Nagisa Oshima’s 1983 Palme d’Or-nominated portrait of resilience, pride, friendship and obsession among four very different men confined in the stifling jungle heat of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Java during World War II.

In 1942, British officer Major Jack Celliers (Bowie) is captured by Japanese soldiers, and after a brutal trial sent, physically debilitated but indomitable in mind, to a Pow camp overseen by the zealous Captain Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto). Celliers’ stubbornness sees him locked in a battle of wills with the camp’s new commandant, a man obsessed with discipline and the glory of Imperial Japan who becomes unnaturally preoccupied with the young Major,...

Both a landmark and a source of much controversy, “Hiroshima” is one of those films where the background is as significant as the picture itself. Let us take things from the beginning, by quoting Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie’s “The Japanese Film”. “In 1953, the Japan Teachers Union decided to go in with Kaneto Shindo and make a film version of the bestselling “Children of the Atom Bomb” (Genbaku no Ko) by Arata Osada. Shindo made a faithful film version, using the name of the book, and showed the aftermath of the bomb without any vicious polemic. (…) The Union was not at all satisfied, saying that he had “made [the story] into a tear-jerker and destroyed its political orintation.” They decided to back another version which would this time “genuinely to help to fight to preserve peace.” They found their man in Hideo Sekigawa, who turned out “Hiroshima”. (…) The picture was financially...