56 minutes / Color
Closed Captioned
Release: 2016
Copyright: 2015
HIROSHIMA BOUND is a personal documentary that tracks the construction of America's collective memory (or lack of one) of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It follows the obscure histories of specific photos and photographers, both Japanese and American, who visited Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bombings, counterposing this visual legacy with the stories of survivors, whose practice of speaking to small groups of students offers a modest but powerful counter-history to the official record.
The film uses its maker's own legacy as a child of the Atomic Age to look at the complexity of the representation of mass death, and the role of the archive in the digital era, taking viewers to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, the International Center of Photography in New York, and to contemporary Hiroshima, in order to explore and 'unpack' the trauma and myth surrounding the culture of Hiroshima representation.
"A film that is both personal and universal. Very powerful ... Poetic and gripping."—Peter Kuznitz, Director, Nuclear Studies Institute, American University
"A daunting and haunting project … extraordinarily moving and simultaneously elucidating. The attention to the construction of the bomb and the images of the effects of the bomb is formidable."—Lynne Sachs, filmmaker (Your Day is My Night)
"There is no doubt this is an important document about our times and lives, which should both motivate and humble us all."—Joke van Kampen, journalist and anti-nuclear activist
Select Accolades
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In 1996, the German nuclear engineer Karl-Heinz Schaab was accused of selling secret information to Iraq. But was Schaab a shrewd traitor or a simple pawn in a much more extensive network?
Eric Nadler and John Friedman | 2015 | 95 minutes | Color
The noted historian's lifelong quest to describe the extermination of the European Jews.
Frank Diamand | 2014 | 65 minutes | Color | English
