Hiroshima Bound 2015
Distributed by Icarus Films, 32 Court St., 21st Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201; 800-876-1710
Directed by Martin Lucas
DVD, color, 56 min.
College - General Adult
Japan, World War II, Nuclear Weapons
Date Entered: 01/27/2017
Reviewed by Susan J. Martin, Head, Acquisitions Services University of ChicagoWrapped in the description of a “personal documentary”, Martin Lucas’s Hiroshima Bound is an emotional film with candid regret for the plight of mankind in the atomic age. Wonderfully lacking in condescension, Martin Lucas has collected and presents a folio of photographs, interviews, and official government documents which range from 1930’s and the early days of the Manhattan Project up to the present day. The photographs are striking; the interviews are fascinating; the emotion of the director is palpable.
The film does not claim that the bomb should never have been made. Nor does it argue that the city of Hiroshima should never have been bombed. This is not a sophomoric protest film. Lucas does not compare the atrocities committed by the Japanese in China, in Burma, or at Pearl Harbor with the horror the American atomic bomb created. Facts are presented to the viewer coupled with a sadness the director has for feeling personally responsible. Lucas even calls the atom bomb “his bomb”- a responsibility he feels he shares with everyone who grew up in the atomic age. We feel the pain of a Hiroshima survivor as she explains how her own mother couldn’t recognize her, a story told with mutilated hands and a smile through scars.
Through government films and documents we see that a great deal of effort went into a sanitizing what actually happened in Hiroshima. A photographic presentation that allowed the world, for a while, to believe that an atomic victory came with relatively little price. Lucas uses the recovered photographs, taken by journalists who were able to sneak into Southern Japan, to tell a very different story.
Hiroshima Bound is recommended with reservations and would be appropriate as a philosophical discussion piece about nuclear weapons and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those expecting a straightforward documentary on the subject may be disappointed with Lucas’ approach, for two sides are never presented. As Lucas would undoubtedly respond: it really makes no difference now. We can only tell the story.