One film about the Hiroshima bombing that drills into emotional bedrock instead of retailing familiar platitudes is “Ishibumi,” Hirokazu Koreeda’s reworking of a classic 1969 TV program produced by Hiroshima Television. The focus of the original TV program and the book that accompanied it were the 322 first-year students and four teachers at Hiroshima Second Middle School who were engaged in demolition work only 500 meters from the hypocenter of the blast and died either on the spot or soon after. Their survivors gathered testimonies about their last words and actions that formed the basis of the book and program.
In Koreeda’s approach, actress Haruka Ayase, a Hiroshima native, sits alone on a straight-back chair and reads excerpts from the testimonies. Meanwhile, photographs of their subjects are projected onto plain wood boxes beside her and on a curving screen behind her. These readings are interspersed with scenes of journalist Akira Ikegami interviewing victims’ family members and others, mostly in Hiroshima settings where it is now impossible to imagine the horrors of seven decades ago (though he also visits the heart-wrenching Peace Memorial Museum).