Within the scope of this 1hr and 30 min documentary award-winning filmmaker Laurence Lévesque beholden us to a meditative silent exploration of human suffering, grievance and memories. Japanese-Canadian woman Noriko Oi (Laurence's step mother) goes to Nagasaki with the pragmatic goal of emptying her old childhood home and selling it, and within the process she discovers many hidden letters stored securely by her late-mother, a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bomb. As she goes through these letters and feels the nostalgic history of her childhood home before having to give her last goodbyes, a very strong melancholy arises and fills her entire being, yet she faces this courageously by responding back to the call of her hero's journey. She soon ventures forth going through the various addresses of the letters across Japan and interviewing many "hibakusha" (atomic survivors) springing forth an opportunity for their untold tales.
The music is beautiful, the cinematography is great. I shouldn't spoil much; no matter how I paraphrase it won't do justice to the stories of these survivors, it's best put forth by themselves. This documentary is just a strong medium towards reaching them. The director has undoubtedly done a spectacular job of making us feel present right there within their room of the most human conversations. It never felt too invasive neither intentionally juxtaposed or forceful for the sake of the camera; the camera just being always there as our eyes to just see the self-existing stories that these humans retell and how inadvertently how these stories continue to live because of them and also are them yet doesn't encapsulate the complete immensity of what either are.
They aren't just survivors, they aren't just lucky humans of a catastrophic event. They aren't just victims, they aren't simply misshapen events: of human nature or of sociological effects of war. They are not just prescribed signs or foreshadowings of humanity's natural doom, and even religious causality for some destined prophecy. They are wholly humans even beyond the utmost spiritually describable sense. The director has been able to give us this indescribable experience of being human by the right balance of exposition and silence throughout the entirety of the 90 min runtime. Thus get ready to sit tight, leave your popcorn and put out your utmost focus being present for 90 mins as you are encouraged to contemplate freely being one with the silence alongside Noriko Oi but not with any directly given questions or messages (unlike Oppenheimer) instead simply sitting with your own being alongside the being of others in the context of one of the most bewitching untold stories in recent human history that you have yet to experience, till now that is.
