Original title: Kuroi ame (Black Rain) (1988)
Director: Shohei Imamura
Starring: Yoshiko Tanaka, Kazuo Kitamura, Etsuko Ichihara, Shoichi Ozawa, Norihei Miki, Keisuke Ishida
Genre: Drama, War
Language: Japanese (English Subtitled)
Details: Japan , 123min, B & W
Awards: Cannes Film Festival
Notes: Not to be confused with the Ridley Scott set-in-Japan action-thriller.
Based on the 1969 novel Kuroi ame by Ibuse Masuji.
"Black Rain" is the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, August 6th 1945, and tells the story of a family of survivors, a middle-aged couple, Shigematsu and Shigeko Shizuma and their niece Yasuko.
Shot in black-and-white and has a discreet Toru Takemitsu score, which is implicitly an anti-nuclear protest. But it also is a protest of discrimination against the atomic bomb survivors, approximately 370,000 today. Also it belongs to a large group of Japanese films concerned with exposing the terrible price exacted of ordinary citizens by World War II. The film shows the impossibility of getting on with everyday life in the wake of such unfathomable destruction.