HBO's disturbing documentary on survivors of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan didn't make the 50th anniversary of the event. There's apparently enough emotional scar tissue built up to allow the television premiere of "White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" on Monday (7:30 p.m. Eastern), exactly 62 years after the United States detonated the first-ever nuclear bomb over Hiroshima. The second, and so far last, atomic bomb was dropped three days later. It ended World War II.The uncomfortable footage of cities reduced to rubble and grotesquely deformed survivors has received relatively little circulation because -- unlike the well-recorded Holocaust -- this was something done by Americans, Sheila Nevins, head of HBO's documentary unit, said.
Steve Okazaki's film is built on stories told by 14 survivors, with childrens' pictures depicting the bombing and footage of the injured that was banned from the public for 25 years. The American-born Okazaki interviews crew members who dropped the bombs and wondered whether they would escape before their planes were engulfed in the mushroom cloud.
The project dates back to the early 1980s, when Okazaki agreed to accompany his sister to a San Francisco, California, area meeting of bomb survivors for a school project she was doing.
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