"Black Rain" by Shohei Imamura. This one is extraordinary, faultless. It is not your regular (idiosyncratic) Imamura, but a prostration to Ozu and japanese classical cinema. It begins so fast you feel just like you were there, just doing your business as usual when somebody dropped an atom bomb in your city. I had checked imdb a few days before watching, but didn't remember the date when I finally came to watch if, and this made the whole experience quite awesome to me since, due to the black and white and purely classical cinematography, this looked like a movie from the fifties — in fact it looked like it was made just after the bombings (the book was written the sixties, based on true stories). I became a little suspicious when bodies, destruction and the whole situation was so well done it looked just like a filmed document of Hiroshima's actual bombing. But since it was made in 1989, it made sense that there where no technical faults making difficult the suspension of disbelief ("Was it really like that?" Yes, you will believe it was really like that). The black and white was a clever choice since it looks and feel like the forties or fifties, and the stunning contrast helps making clear with the darkest undertones what maybe is the darkest situation humankind has ever dealt with.

But this is just the beginning. Then we have the real meat of the movie with a family drama on the Hibakusha. Not only had these fellows to deal with horrible immediate tragedy, and chronic and fatal disease in the next few years, but were also discriminated by society at large! The basic story is about a girl, beautiful Yoshiko Tanaka, whom nobody will marry because she may get ill and die anytime since fallout, in the form a large black rain drops, fell upon her.

This is a tearjerker, but only because you will cry, since it is not any bit sentimental, and japanese irony (and even humour — crazy japs!) permeates the whole thing with anger and subtleness.