Keiji Zakazawa proudly displays an issue of his popular 1970s comic series, “Barefoot Gen.” Inside, Gen’s bubble eyes bulge above a mouth ballooning in terror as a shockwave blows the buildings around him to shrapnel. This comic book story is far from fiction, taking place in Hiroshima in 1945. The 69-year-old author lost his father, sister, and two brothers in the atomic bombing his drawings depict.

Zakazawa is one of 14 Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors interviewed in Steven Okazaki’s documentary, White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a film released in 2007 and distributed by HBO. Graphic and heart-wrenching, the film alternates between explicit archival footage and present-day interviews with survivors from both cities.

Okazaki pulls no punches in his depiction of the survivors’ experiences during and after the bombings. Hospital footage shows victims glossy with bleeding raw burns, their faces contorted with pain. Black-and-white stills expose bodies of children charred beyond recognition. Since no close range footage exists of the explosion itself, hauntingly grotesque eyewitness drawings and paintings illustrate the survivors’ words. Some drawings depict melting figures in the throes of pain and grief; others represent human bodies as gray smudges littered across the page.

Most of the survivors in the film are sharing their stories with the public for the first time through Okazaki’s lens. “I have carried this pain in my heart that I couldn’t talk about,” says Sakue Shimohira, who was ten when she saw her sister killed in the bombing. Even now she says she cannot speak her sister’s name aloud: it hurts too much. Other survivors bear their scars physically. Sumiteru Taniguchi removes his shirt for the camera, revealing a mangled chest. He points to it, saying, “You can see my heart beating between the ribs.”

White Light/Black Rain owes much of its intensity to its intentional lack of political commentary. “It shows the arrogance of historians to think you could adequately explain it just using experts,” said Okazaki in an interview from his office in Berkeley, California. He added in his slow, philosophical drawl, “I had no desire to have any experts. I wanted it to be their voices.”

The result of his endeavor is a penetrating but narrow look at the bombs’ short- and long-term effects on two sets of people: the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Americans who came into personal contact with the bombs prior to their detonations. By avoiding any discussion of the decisions behind the bombings, Okazaki attempts to shield them from experts’ rationalizations. “All the other accounts are political explanations and excuses,” Okazaki said. “It’s such a politicized subject.”

Okazaki’s depoliticization of the inherently political event amplifies its horrific nature, perhaps at the expense of doing justice to the American perspective. The American interviewees justify their lack of sympathy by saying that the war needed to end. However, the horror allegedly averted by the bombings lies outside the purview of the documentary. Without footage of the fighting in the Pacific, the American interviewees are left with only archival anti-Japanese U.S. government invective to support their assertions.

Despite the film’s limited focus, its powerful depiction of the horrors of nuclear war, especially in light of the continued and pressing relevance of nuclear proliferation, renders White Light/ Black Rain a truly worthwhile and critical film. In one of the opening scenes, Japanese youth interviewed on the street fail, one by one, to identify the significance of August 6, 1945—the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. “No one we interviewed knew the answer to the question,” Okazaki said of the section.

Whether they should be examined politically or apolitically, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki certainly must not be forgotten—something the film ensures. As difficult as the documentary can be to view—a review in The New York Times rightly asserted that the “final third of the film is almost unwatchable”— Okazaki stressed that the people interviewed are those close-range victims who fared best not only physically but also mentally and emotionally.

“These are the survivors,” he said. “I met people who lived through it and survived, but you couldn’t call them survivors.”

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