Our Hiroshima

Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow, a relentless campaigner for peace, sets the tone of “Our Hiroshima”. She was thirteen when the first atomic bomb destroyed her city and killed several members of her family. By interspersing Setsuko’s vivid, eyewitness testimony with archival footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Anton Wagner brings alive the reality of an unimaginable horror. This film also takes a long look at the US Army’s determination to test the new weapon before the end of the war, and delves deeply into the essential roles played by the Canadian government, uranium industry, and scientists in the Manhattan Project. In the words of one critic: “The Canadian perspective has always seemed rather smug to me. We didn’t have anything to do with the bomb, so we can cluck appropriately. ‘Our Hiroshima’ gets it right by identifying the Canadian components of the bomb” (Jim Bawden, Toronto Star). “Our Hiroshima” is not comfortable viewing, but it clearly shows that the responsibility for nuclear weapons lies with everyone – both in the past and in the present. Indifference, it tells us, is not an option.