Year: 1995

Format: 16 mm

Runtime: 55 min

 

Fifty years after the atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 'Nagasaki Stories' seeks the personal and reveals the private recollections of some of Nagasaki's inhabitants, who survived the bomb.

 

We meet Mr. Kyushiro Kusakabe, a former reporter who lost his mother and wife, and who now, 50 years after the catastrophe, is travelling from Tokyo to Nagasaki, together with his sister-in-law. They speak about their memories of everyday life in prewar multi-cultural Nagasaki. By the time the two travellers reach Nagasaki we have come to know a municipal civil servant who tried unsuccesfully to map the area that had been ruined during the war, a former kamikaze pilot awaiting his death in a hospital, two sisters whose father had been a kimono tailor who went bankrupt when the war changed clothing habits, and a photographer who started his career the moment the A-bomb destroyed his hometown.

 

Their stories are balanced by home movie fragments which never literally illustrate yet do comment on, and sometimes poetically colour, the memories they speak of.

 

Written & directed by Jos de Putter

Director of photography: Paul Cohen

Edited by Puck Goossen

Sound recording: Mark van der Willigen

Original music by Vincent van Warmerdam

Sound design: Jack Bol

Research Japan: Jacintha Hin

Production Japan: Misako Furukawa

Produced by Jos de Putter

 

Copyright 1995 Dieptescherpte / IKON