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Drama

Hiroshima mon amour

Year
1959
Length
90 minCriterion 90-minute presentation Version sources ↓

A brief affair in Hiroshima opens a difficult passage between public catastrophe and private memory.

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Language
French
RomanticBleakStrange Best saved for later · For patient viewers Drama
Hiroshima mon amour: An anonymous embracing couple fades into a softly painted river and Hiroshima skyline.

Image: Monocurator · source · Original Monocurator artwork

What to expect

Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras reshape romance through repetition, contradiction, and fractured time. The film refuses to let one person’s memory stand in for Hiroshima while showing how remembrance alters intimacy.

How to ease in

The opening is meant to destabilise what counts as seen, known, or remembered. Let repeated phrases change meaning rather than forcing the chronology into order immediately.

Heads-up

A quick, non-exhaustive note Includes archival images of atomic-bomb injuries, wartime trauma, death, public humiliation, and an extramarital affair.
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There is an enormous distance between saying I have seen something and truly knowing it. While watching, I caught myself beginning to feel that I understood, only to be met again with 'You saw nothing.' It made me wary of how easily I might mistake another person's memory for something I can possess.

— Momo

Momo thinking about this film

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